Web Administration: Web Resources
Developing a project outline
Purpose
The purpose of this document is to explain the basic set of tasks that need to be performed in order to develop a project outline. The outline is designed to give a project manager a sense of the project's goals, audience, sponsor, stakeholders, deliverables, requirements, and rough timeline. The outline is not intended to be a foolproof guideline that instructs a project manager how to manage a project.
Let's Get Started
The goal of this tutorial is to help give you a sense of direction, via an outline, to follow while you manage the requests that are asked of you.
What is a project?
A project is a finite endeavor (having specific start and completion dates) undertaken to analyze, create, modify or sunset a unique product or service which brings about beneficial change or added value.
For this tutorial, we'll cover a case story where the chair of the Underwater Basket Weaving Program wants to update their site.
Who
In most cases here at UF, the who can be defined as the sponsor and the users.
The sponsor is the owner of the end result of your project. He is also responsible for the political support you may need for your project's funding, labor resources, and deadline. If you're running a project that is being overseen by a committee, then you may want to consider reporting to an individual who has been designated as the sponsor. Having only one sponsor improves your chances of having fewer obstacles during the "What" phase when you determine what will be built.
The users are the people and machines (think Google) that will use your site. Your project sponsor should be able to quickly identify the users as "undergraduates at UF" or "high school students".
In our case story, the who looks like this:
Sponsor: Albert J. Gator, Chair of Underwater Basket Weaving
Users:
- high school students
- graduate students (out of state)
- corporations looking to benefit from our research in underwater basket weaving
What
Once you have a chance to meet and speak with your project sponsor your likely to have ideas bouncing off the walls for what needs to be in the site. It's critical at this point to balance out your sponsor's needs with what you discover from the users.
When
In some cases, the most important issue to your sponsor is "When will it be done?". To answer that question, you'll need to add up how much time it will take to produce the deliverables you listed in the previous section.
In order to determine how much time it will take to complete the project, you'll need to estimate how much time it takes to produce the deliverables.
One important task to include in every project step and deliverable is communication. It takes time to keep the sponsor and sometimes the users involved in and aware of the progress of the project.
There is no one right answer to estimating the time it takes to produce something. Even if you use outside vendors (i.e. graphic designers, markup specialists, etc) you should consider "buffering" or adding on to their estimates in order to ensure a reasonable schedule. As you do more projects your ability to estimate will improve.
As an example, take a look at following timeline for the Underwater Basket Weaving Program's Site Refresh:
- Week 1
- Goal definition with sponsor (3 hours)
- Includes tasks and measurements for their success
- Online surveys (2 hours)
- Week 2
- Local site visit with current users to test current site against tasks (24 hours)
- Card sorting of current site pages (8 hours)
- Week 3
- Compile results form survey, tests, and card sorts (8 hours)
- Paper prototyping of new site using survey, usability test, and card sort results (25 hours)
- Week 4
- Graphic composition of new layout using paper prototype results (8 hours)
- Markup of the pages and information architecture for refreshed version (20 hours)
- Week 5
- Styling the pages with CSS and any additional changes (40 hours)
- Week 6
- Update the site with any changes or recommendations from style and markup validation tests (2 hours)
- Lab usability testing to confirm the improvement in task completion rates (20 hours)
- Week 7
- Release the site into test and then production (4 hours)
- Establish a maintenance schedule and task monitoring plan and implement them (12 hours)
- Week 8
- Schedule and conduct a project review to identify what went well and what could be improved in the future (4 hours)
- Communicate results in writing to sponsor, project team and other interested parties. File all documentation for project in a known location for future reference (4 hours)
How
For the scope of this tutorial, the how is left up to you. How a web site can be built depends a lot on what you need to have done. There are many ways to build a site.
If you need help with how to build a web site, please join or send a mail to the Web Managers listserv (web-managers-l@lists.ufl.edu).
Closing Phases and Beyond
While it is great to have the site released, even better things exist once the site is released. However, you must first get the sponsor to agree that the project is completed and accept a maintenance and monitoring plan for the site.