IT Project Plan & Presentation

Project Planning

Data Communications

For the project to run successfully, communication would play a key role in ensuring that project milestones and expectations are communicated effectively. In this case, the development of the e-commerce website would require multiple teams such as IT professionals and other project stakeholders to communicate with each other in the course of the project in all the phases of the project to get it completed within the set scope.

Different forms of communication would come in handy in the project with both one on one communication being used along with indirect forms of communication in order to improve the project’s efficiency. To start with, the teams would be holding meetings every two weeks with daily stand-up meetings. These meetings would give the teams an opportunity to bond, create trust and get collaborate on work projects. In such meetings, each team member would be given an opportunity to contribute to the meeting agendas, giving each one an equal opportunity to feel part of the project.

On the other hand, IT tools could be used to facilitate better communications and collaboration. For textual communications, Slack could be used to make it possible for team members to send each other messages and participate in internal discussions through the inbuilt channels that are supported in the app (Berman, 2012). Besides that, the application also allows the organization to add other app integrations that could be beneficial to the team such as Google Drive, Meister Task etc.

Apart from using Slack, email communication and other video technologies such as Skype could be used to facilitate communication among team members. Such tools could make it possible for team members to be in touch even when they are not physically together. Besides that, such tools could give people an opportunity to keep track of communications and seek clarifications on different project issues.

For the software development teams, collaboration tools such as GitHub could be used to ensure that software development tasks are shared across the team in an efficient way. For example, all the e-commerce tasks could be treated as branches and different team members assigned to create functionality and push the source code when it is completed (Malić, Makitan & Petrov, 2016). Other task management tools that could be used by the project team include Meister Task and Status Hero, which could both be used as task management and standup automation systems respectively.

Project Planning Methodologies

Development of an e-commerce website would require the software development team to use a specific software development methodology in order to get the project completed. In my own opinion, the waterfall project planning methodology would be the most ideal for use in this particular project according to (Malić, Makitan & Petrov, 2016).

As the name suggests, this is a software development methodology whereby the project tasks are done in a systematic manner one at a time. For example, the development of the actual e-commerce site cannot start without the team having to engage in other project tasks such as project definition and requirements analysis as the project planning methodology is systematic in nature.

One of the key benefits of using this methodology is the fact that it is simple to implement and processed-based as the project team cannot proceed to the next stage without completing the previous one. The waterfall model could be implemented in the following key phases:

Problem definition: the team would assess the project’s problem by identifying the business need that is being addressed by the project.

Requirements analysis: the team would come up with functional and non-functional requirements for the project and identify ways through which the project could address those requirements.

System design: the software development team would then come up with system mockups that would demonstrate how the system would work and how the various components would interact with each other.

System development: during this phase, the software development team would participate in the actual development of the e-commerce website. This phase would take considerable amount of resources and budget and it would lead to the creation of the system based on the designs created.

System testing and debugging: in this stage, the software development team would create unit and acceptance tests to check whether the system meets its requirements.

System implementation: the software development team would deploy the system on a live server and end users could actually start using it.

System maintenance: routine checks and correction of minor bugs would be done as the system is operational.

References

Arnott, D., Lizama, F., & Song, Y. (2017). Patterns of business intelligence systems use in organizations. Decision Support Systems, 97, 58-68.

Berman, S. J. (2012). Digital transformation: opportunities to create new business models. Strategy & Leadership, 40(2), 16-24.

Malić, M., Makitan, V., & Petrov, I. (2016). Change control in project of web application development in e-commerce environment.