Week 4

What I Did

Detailed the Project Proposal

• Worked on the details of each objective (these are my objectives);
  
  
  • To research literature on the area of Web Services specifically in relation to CMS for tertiary education institutions.
    
    
  • To investigate a suitable methodology that will identify with the social needs specific to the business environment thereby producing requirements that support the stakeholder interests and vision for the resulting system.
    

  • To examine the tertiary educational facility and determine how a revolutionary model using web services would be established.

  • To develop a sound data schema representing the Meta Data of the primary data stores in a design usable by the web service to determine favourable search results.
    
    
  • To replicate an instance of the existing MIS environ by designing a module that will be used to determine the design specifications
    
    
  • To design the middleware and portal solution
    
    
  • To test a working prototype of the system modules and then integrate them
  
  

• Developed Risks - these were the things on my mind;
  
  
  1. Research on Risks in a software development environment
     
     
     • What kind of risks apply?
     • How much detail does this risk assesment need?
     • How many pages should it be?
     • What information about the risk is relavent?
     
     
  2. Compile some main points
     

• Came up with Critical Success Factors

1. Time Management – each phase to occur in planned time slots.

2. Ability to access published & documented material respective to the study area – Message Oriented Middleware utilizing RESTful Web Services.

3. Support and participation of school officials in approval and continuous support throughout the life of the project.

4. Manage the scope of the project to meet realistic and feasible objectives.

5. Adaptive risk management – the ability to anticipate and plan for changing risk potentials as the project phases succeed each other to the end.

6. Designing a strong DTD Schema for the middleware to base its decisions upon.

7. Guidance from the technical staff involved in the daily procedures of the existing MIS.

8. Rigorous testing to minimize bugs and rework at later phases.

9. Maintenance of the project diary

How I Did It

• A lecturer sent the entire project class a link on risk
  
  I read the document and still had trouble getting my risks on paper. I could think of many things that would go wrong but I was still not clear on if they qualified as an actual 'risk'.
  
  So I decided to go back to the last place I met "Risk" - This was a couple terms ago in ITPQM. I did a pretty decent risk assessment for the CW in that term so maybe if I look over some of the documentation I can remember how i went about doing a risk assesment then and use the steps to come up with some risks for the final project.
  
  
  

• The critical success factors came quite naturally after I FINALLY got some risks on paper.
  

Why I Did It

• I used a picture ... very close to a Concept Map to draw out my ideas for risks. The idea was brought forward in the DIS (Distributed Information Systems) class the previous saturday. I usually dont like drawings of any kind (I cannot, draw, paint, sketch; all my efforts look horrible). But when the lecturer explained the use of Mind Maps and Concept Mapping I thought the purpose fit the situation... where i could not get the ideas out of my head... so I tried it.
  The outcome was far from perfect but now I have some risks to work with.
  

Lessons Learned

A picture is worth a thousand .... pixels .... ideas ...

A simple answer is not a wrong answer. I struggled with the risks so much because I thought the simple ideas I had were wrong.

Just because this is a technical project does not mean every bitty part of it is complex.

What I Plan to Do

1. WBS
2. Relevance of other courses
   
3. Compile References
4. Start putting the entire proposal together