INFM 603
Information Technology and Organizational Context
Spring 2015
Assignment P2
Project Plan

The goal of this document is for your team to describe the goals of your project and how you will accomplish those goals. The goals must be suitably ambitious (much more ambitious than a homework assignment, much less ambitious than a year-long effort by a professional Web services company). Specifically, the project should be scoped to be accomplished by two people working together for 6 weeks, working a total of 7 hours per week. That's 84 person-hours, or roughly half a person-month of effort (i.e., the scope of the project should be roughly what one professional could reasonably expect to achieve in a couple of weeks of full time work).

The goal of your project should be grounded in external reality, not in something that you have made up. For example, it would not be good to choose to make a database for cooking recipes if you don't know someone who needs such a database (and it would be good to do so if you have been thinking about starting a company that actually needs such a database). Note that the person who needs the result of your project should not be you -- you can be an agent who envisions the real needs of others (e.g., in the case of the database of cooking recipes -- your customer would be the people who would use your database, not you).

Although there are few limits on what your project could be on (it needs to exercise technologies learned in this class, it needs to comply with the university's Acceptable Use Policy, it needs to be suitably ambitious, it needs to have an external customer, ...), I would encourage you to consider using a Content Management System to implement your project. With a CMS it is possible to build something much more ambitious than you could build in a similar amount of time using hand-coding, and typical CMS systems such as Joomla or Drupal use all of the technologies that we have discussed (and in particular they expose each of the technologies, so you could add PHP, JavaScript, or database tables as you need them).

The project plan should be about 3 pages (single-spaced; please don't waste "paper" by double-spacing). It should name the project, name the students, describe the computational infrastructure that you plan to use, describe the task, name the customer, describe the requirements, and include a schedule and a task division among the two team members.

You should start a Web page for your project, and post your project plan there. Send the professor an email with the URL for your project Web page once you have posted the project plan there. Don't later remove things from this Web site -- you can add newer versions if you like (although that's not required), but once an assignment has been submitted please don't change or delete it. This way when you get to the end you will have a good picture of how your thinking evolved over time.

Doug Oard
Last modified: Wed Jan 14 21:37:46 2015