Archive for Project Updates
OSU HomeBase … new look… same purpose -> none
Tailgating, Ohio State Football
The brainchild website of the business, OSU Home Base underwent a new look. OSU Home Base is a website dedicated to our alumni group and Ohio State Football. The purpose is to serve as a general forum for old friends to stay connected and to meet new friends with common interests. I created this site as an undergrad student and during one of its many transformations, I got a lot of attention and a few job offers. I got enough offers, in fact, that I decided to go a little bigger and start my own business… and Home Base Web Solutions was born.
Juggling stakeholders, vendors, and complex internal integration points
I am in the middle of a 2+ year program at Ohio State implementing a third party housing application. Our program originally consisted of two major phases and many sub projects. The goal was to replace an old mainframe system that manages housing assignments with a very new, very slick COTS software that would bring our housing department into the current century. One major challenge, however, is that the central IT department at Ohio State is also moving from a mainframe student information system (SIS) to a new sort of COTS version of PeopleSoft. In order to mitigate risk of simultaneous Go-Lives with the Housing and central SIS system, we implemented the housing system in two phases. Phase 1 was implementing the new housing system and Phase 2 is currently under way, which is converting all of our interfaces to work with the new SIS system. I will not go into too much detail in this post, but I am sure you can imagine the undertaking of converting 10,000+ bed spaces from a mainframe application to a SQL Server powered web application. The application also manages campus dining plan selections, additional monies deposited on campus debit cards, and door access privileges. We have since expanded to manage summer conferences services. I could probably write a solid book on everything we have done and what we have learned, but the purpose of this post is to introduce a presentation that I submitted to ACUHO-I. Below is the extract. Hopefully it is accepted. Once we get the green light, I will be sure to post updates here. I plan to actually perform a juggling act during the hour long presentation… so I have a few months to learn how to juggle. 
Title: How to juggle stakeholders, vendors, and integration for a housing system deployment.
Participants will: listen to the pros and cons of moving to a third party housing application from a home grown system.
Participants will: learn about some of the complex integration challenges between a third party application and internal systems such as other home grown mainframe applications, PeopleSoft, and BlackBoard.
Participants will: learn how to balance the difficult juggling act of managing stakeholder expectations with vendor and technical constraints.
This program will be an overview of Ohio State’s journey from using a home grown mainframe application to managing housing assignments with a third party system. We will briefly cover where we came from and what we are capable of doing today. Ohio State offers a unique perspective on some of the pros and cons of both a home grown application that has been customized over the past 30 years and also using a powerful third party application. The presentation will include hurdles we have overcome and challenges we continue to face including vendor management, stakeholder expectations, and some complex integration points with various university systems. We will also touch on the massive undertaking of migrating over 10,000 bed spaces from one system to another and how business processes and personnel have adjusted to a new way of doing things.
Presentation Outline: This presentation will be a standard Power Point delivery, with some comic relief to keep the audience engaged. Time permitting, we will have a brief question and answer session at the end.
- Overview of existing mainframe application
- Vendor selection method
- Benefits of and decision to move to StarRez
- Hurdles we overcame moving to StarRez
- Challenges we continue to face
- Vendor management
- Data integration management
- PeopleSoft
- BlackBoard
- Mainframe Applications
- Meeting stakeholder’s expectations, including students
Project Update – Amherst Vision Center
The Amherst Vision Center website project is complete. Home Base basically provided a facelift to the site.
The old site can be seen here:
Old Site... in all her glory
The new site can be seen here:
Beautiful
Not much changed as far as text and content. We did rearrange some of the linking structure to better categorize everything. Home Base provided design services and also hosts the web and email for Amherst Vision Center. We installed a Word Press driven site to provide some content management capabilities.
Building websites gets personal
Baron Landscaping
Some of the toughest clients are family. A major part of effective project management is defining your client’s expectations early in the project. The problem with working for family is that there are always implied expectations that don’t always get put on paper. You also usually work for a discount, if not for free, so motivation to work extra hours to get things done is pretty low. Fortunately, my brother isn’t a computer geek like me. The fact that he has a website at all gives him an edge on his competition so customer satisfaction was pretty easy to achieve. I also know that those discounts and implied expectations are a two way street… so now I have the coolest landscaping on the block.
Check out Baron Landscaping and if you’re in North East Ohio and your yard needs help, call up ole’ Danny Boy and tell him Mike sent you. I’m pretty sure you won’t get a discount, but you will make both of us happy.
MCF Solutions project kicks off new Home Base design
MCF Solutions
To kick off the new website, Home Base would like to showcase one of our current projects. We are working with Urban Fox Design on a complete web redesign for a dental equipment sales company. One of our strategic initiatives this year is to incorporate industry standard project management methodologies and a formal software development life cyle into small web development projects.
I will be quick since this is our first post and I obviously have a lot more work to do on the website. The idea behind the project management methodology is to take the Project Management framework used on Ohio State’s Student Life enterprise level projects and scale it to an appropriate level of management on smaller web app projects. I just got my PMP in December 2008 so all of the knowledge areas and process groups are fresh on my mind. When you’re a small company and you’re dealing with projects that require less than 50 man hours and maybe four resources, you don’t want to over-manage. I think this is the dilemma many process oriented managers face in a small business environment. With MCF, and with all of our current projects, we focus on the following:
- Set, Manage, and Meet client expectations
- Frequently communicate status and progress
- Keep metrics to improve future projects and processes
All three focus areas above are applied to the project management triple constraints, which I think are worth another set of bullets:
- Cost
- Scope
- Schedule
Clearly communicating how much a project is going to cost, when it is going to get done, and exactly what a client can expect their new website to do up front is a huge part of our process. It is very difficult to define scope and come up with accurate estimates early in projects, especially when you’re working with a client who doesn’t really know what they want, but the more time you spend early on defining and documenting scope, the better. It is much better to frustrate a client by telling them something can’t be done up front than it is to tell them it can be done, have them spend a bunch of money on you, and then fail to deliver. It also just straight up sucks when you have vague requirements and then you can’t justify charging more for scope creep. Before I really embraced implementing project management methodologies, that happened to me more often than I’d like to admit.
This ties into our SDLC. Home Base follows sort of a modified RUP/Agile Software Development Life Cycle. We go through several iterations similar to Agile, but each iteration follows RUP-like process. I think I will save the specifics for a dedicated post, but we try to break each project into smaller parts, and then have clear phases with phase gate meetings within each mini-cycle. For example, the MCF project has a bunch of static content and several dynamically driven components. The project is broken into the following cycles:
- Graphic Design – Site Template and Static Content
- Admin Framework
- Slide Show, events, contact us (dynamic content)
- Case Studies
Each cycle essentially passes through requirements elicitation, design, development, quality assurance, and release to production. I have fancy names for these phases, but I’ll save them for the longer post with plenty of pictures and diagrams. In any case, we spend a lot of time on requirements and once Mark at MCF approves them, each cycle will enter development phase. Progress can be monitored at http://dev.mcf-solutions.com. The caveat is that there are no promises that anything in development will actually work. It’s my playground, and I can do what I want in there, damn it!
When I think I’m done with development for a cycle, I copy everything to QA at http://qa.mcf-solutions.com. At Home Base, the lovely Brittany Baron will hopefully agree to be our Quality Analyst. Once she finds all of my major bugs (and I fix them), we ask the client to review and approve that the QA version of the site matches what they asked for in their requirements. THIS IS IMPORTANT!! At this point, I often have clients say things like, “well I kind of thought the site should do this and not that.” That’s great, and we can accomodate, but if we had good requirements and we can basically check off that the site meets them, these new requests equal change requests that we can charge for. Not that I’m looking for new and improved ways to make money. The later you make changes in a project, the bigger the impact. I also don’t enjoy working for free. Communicating this part of the puzzle up front usually causes clients to think a littly harder when coming up with their requirements. Then I come closer to getting what they want the first time around, so they get their site done sooner and cheaper and everybody is happy! If they really want to implement those changes, we can start the cycle over or decide to postpone changes for later.
If the client approves of what is in QA, we simply copy straight to production.
And that’s it! Somehow I just wrapped up the process I’ve been thinking about for years in a nutshell! With MCF, the design cycle is currently moving from dev to QA. While Brittany, Mark from MCF, and George from Urban Fox nit pick all of my minor design flaws, I am going to start work on filling in some of the admin framework in dev. Hopefully this article gives some insight into our process. I look forward to updating here as much as I can.