TECHNICAL WRITING/PROJECT PLANNING

Project Specifics and Associated Assignments
Project managers plan, schedule, and control activities to satisfy project requirements and to meet business needs. Some of these activities include business analysis, requirements gathering, project planning, budget estimating, development, testing, training, and implementation. Throughout the duration of this course, you will work through the stages of a typical project lifecycle to produce common project documents and technical communications such as wireframes, mockups, quick reference guides and a user manual plan using the scenario below as a baseline for your project.
Project Scenario:
Your company has determined there is a need for an employee portal website to simplify access to commonly used information and resources to allow employees to become more informed and to increase the ability for employees to complete their own transactions. Areas of focus for this new website include a number of personalized self-service tools, information about onboarding, knowledgebases, work/life balance resources, benefits information, employee handbooks, and other searchable on-demand content. These resources must be available 24×7 and accessible from anywhere (home, work, mobile devices, etc.). Your company has approximately 5000 employees geographically dispersed around the globe. This global audience must factor into your design considerations; network and infrastructure requirements;training; usability design;user acceptance testing;and other implementation requirements. Additionally, your project team members are also located in a number of locations meaning you will have to consider varied time zones and virtual technologies to facilitate the project work. These resources do not report directly to you and come from a number of organizations across the company. This means you will need to identify strategies for dealing with conflict, managing work in a virtual environment, dealing with competing priorities, and managing performance when the resources do not report to you from an organizational perspective.
You will be expected to incorporate the items below into your website design, keeping in mind that content management strategies should be employed to minimize clicks and keep core content categories together in an organized fashion. You may also add other features to your design:
• Employee expense report forms
• Tuition Reimbursement
• Electronic time cards
• Employee handbook
• Knowledgebase (Ask an expert)
• Leave of absence requests
• Work/life balance
• 401K Plans
• Vacation requests
• Job postings
• Policies and procedures
• Stock purchase plans
• Global holiday calendar
• People directory
• Organizational charts
• Health insurance
• New employee orientation
• Suggestion box
• Training opportunities
• Success stories/employee spotlight
• Benefits
Solid project plans document very specific and granular tasks. You may conduct research to review sample website development project plans and proposals to ensure you develop a comprehensive plan for your project.
For each lesson, you will be expected to complete high-quality, professional documents and submit the specific items as defined below:
Lesson 1
• Use the Team Charter templateprovided to establish the charter for your project team. This activity establishes the foundation for your team to function effectively and is an important step.

• Use the Stakeholder Analysis templateto analyze the stakeholders associated with your project.

• Write a 1-page business case that describes the business need and briefly describes your employee portal website development project.

Submit all completed documents.
Lesson 2
• Use the Scope Statement templateto clearly articulate the scope for your project.

• Use the Work Breakdown Structure templateto identify the tasks and subtasks for your project. Completing this step will help make the creation of your project Gantt chart easier.