Evangelical Lutheran Church of Frederick, MD website Screenshot
Practicum
Unfortunately, this site has changed since we completed a site for the Church in May 2007. Nothing on their new site looks or even uses any of our original set up for them. I do not know why they decided to change their site.
For this project, the class worked in a group to develop a new website for a real client, The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Frederick, MD. Each of the members on the team served an integral role in the development of the client’s website.
My role on this project was that of a project manager as well as helping our primary programmer with some of the programming and debugging of the site. The team consisted of seven members including: Aubrey Patsika, Christine Shaffer, Adrienne Lawrence, Joseph Poole, Mayuran Thurairatnam, Sharif Gaines, and myself.
For the duration of the project I worked on Project Planning, Project Monitoring and Control, and some Risk Management. Determining the Scope of the project was very easy. We knew that were building an entire site for the Church and that a deadline constrained the development time to only a matter of weeks entire semester. I planned out each process and did my best to stick with the schedule but weather contraints during the semester set back meeting times which lead to a breakdown in communication between members and slower production times, something I did not account for in the priliminary planning.
As a group we determined that another way to cut back production times was to go to an outside source for many of the smaller time consuming projects. Ultimately, this helped not only to meet our deadlines, but to make the church’s website much easier for them to update. Based on suggestions from each group member, we decided to use Google’s Blogger.com for allowing the site to be easily updated, allowing the content on the new site to be the most current. We also implemented Google’s Calendar into the site so that the church can get dates to its members easily.
Risk Management that I had done included compensating for time that may be lost due to issues and bugs which we could never really predict. I did not compensate for bad weather which I did not predict occuring so late in the semester. But nevertheless, the time that I had set for development was much longer than actually required; we also had a bit of luck and did not have many bugs in the code. We got the project done on time and the bugs that we did have were worked out quickly during the week of the site’s launch.
Looking back, There are many things that I would have changed in the way I have planned this project, but it was a great learning experience. Software Project Management is a tough process. To those who do Software Project Management as a career, my hats of to you. I believe that after this project I may be able to do this again, but I definitely enjoy writing code much more than stressing about keeping the project close to the deadline. There are to many bumps in the road that are just so hard to account for in the development process.
Hood College
Univ. of Louisville