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| A Proposal to Redesign the Persons School of Marlboro College Alumni Site
Executive Summary This Project is intended to implement functionalities on the Persons School of Marlboro College Website that will help improve communication between the school and its alumni and also facilitate communication amongst alumni. The project will accomplish the following objectives 1. Enable alumni to update their current information like personal profiles, address, career updates and any other life events to enable the school keep in touch with them 2. Enable alumni communicate with one another. 3. Propose additional information on the site that is useful to enhance these relations 1. Project.1.1 Rationale The number of people graduating from the Persons school is increasing and it is often difficult to maintain current contact with them. The website is one of the places through which alumni can update their contact information. It is also useful for alumni to keep in touch with each other not only to share experiences but opportunities. An earlier survey that was conducted by the school reported that networking was the number one avenue through which most alumni got jobs. In addition, Prospective students often visit the alumni site when deciding whether to attend it's academic programs, so the site must be both current and accurate 1.2 Goals1.2.1 Create an online system of updating personal contact information by alumni. 1.2.2. Create an online system of communicating amongst alumni with the kind of options necessary to search for alumni that match certain profiles and contacting them while safeguarding the individual privacies. 1.2.3. Propose any additional information that is necessary on the website to further alumni relations. (Such as Information about alumni events, alumni resources, etc) 1.3 Process.The process will involve holding consultations with the various stakeholders, namely the school's administration, a selected sample of alumni and some current students. This process has already been initiated with many useful ideas generated. A review of selected competitor sites will be done and all the ideas generated here will feed into the final functionalities. The low-end solution would be to create forms where information can be entered and passed on to an email address then manually entered into a database. The other option would be to make accessible online a database with access controls so that people can access their profiles and update them whenever they want to. All these options will be investigated. 1.3.1 Development EnvironmentThe applications will be developed using cold fusion because it has the necessary capabilities to create and manipulate databases,dynamically generated website content and also because it is supported by the Persons School server. Cold fusion is a high level language with easy to understand syntax giving it a shorter learning curve without compromising any of the power and flexibility of low level languages like Java. The coding and programming will be done by me with the support of Ian Kozack the director of IT. It is hoped that the systems development cycle will be a continuous process with feedback at each stage as indicated in the development cycle diagram. A smaller number of persons will participate in the process from stage 2 as indicated the the table below. 1.3.2 Stages in the site Development
The descriptions above only constitute the front end development of the site, there are many backend issues that are not mentioned here e.g. the creation of databases for storing data most of the data on alumni exists in electronic form it will be resolved later whether new information needs to be collected, login controls and how these will be made accessible to all alumni,implementations on the server side like development of CGI scripts that will facilitate communications amongst different clients and servers. These issues will be resolved as the project develops. A tentative timeline has been developed which is likely to change as more issues come up. 1.3.3Timeline for Capstone Project to Redesign The Persons School of Marlboro College Website
2.1 ClientThe Persons School of Marlboro College is a fairly new organization; it has been in existence for about six years now. The school offers a range of highly customized and innovative workforce training and community programs, including undergraduate, graduate executive education certification and other non-credit courses and programs. The number of people graduating from the Persons School is increasing every year and is likely to increase with the inevitable effect of increasing the number of people interested in the school's activities. It is a challenge to which the school has to respond. There is a strong feeling within the school's administration and various sectors of the alumni community that the website should play an increasing role not only in fostering relations between the school and it's alumni but also in fostering relations amongst alumni. The site could be used to create an online community in which alumni can stay in touch with each other and the school, share ideas and opportunities as well as life events. News about exciting successes of other alumni could be used to communicate the school's viability for the future, present and past students. An alumni database in which alumni can search for other alumni with needed skills, common interests, those who live in a certain area, etc could be made accessible via the web. In the year 2000 the administration conducted a survey that was intended to help better understand the actual role of the degree programs in securing professional opportunities as well as the level of awareness of the school and its programs. The entire population of 143 alumni was surveyed and of these, a total of 58 responded. When asked whether they were working full time, part-time or whether they were unemployed, most of them reported they were working full time and nearly all of them reported they had obtained their jobs through networking, showing the importance of this activity. Some of the alumni that were contacted for this redesign process expressed disappointment that the school's website did not support networking among alumni. Many suggested that in addition to an online database that could be accessible to all alumni, the site could have a of photo gallery that could be used in case where one did not remember the name of a classmate. Some of the alumni reported that they wanted to have more information on the site and links to resources like jobs on the site; more activities that could bring the school's alumni together like reunions. These will fall outside the immediate objectives of this capstone, but will be included in a recommendation report for the alumni relations strategy. 2.2 Competitive LandscapeThere are a growing number of schools offering programs that are more or less similar to the ones offered at the Persons School. The Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire offers a Masters of Science in Information Technology Management that combines business concepts with technology, Mercy College in New York offers a Masters of Science in Internet Business System which is strongly related to the ISM program that is offered at the Person's School. These schools are not much larger than the Persons School. A look at how some of these colleges are interacting with their alumni provides lessons for this capstone. The Mercy College in New York has a permanent officer devoted to alumni affairs. The Franklin Piece College has a whole board of 13 persons that is dedicated to alumni affairs signifying the importance these schools attach to fostering relations with their alumni. It however is important to note that such issues will fall outside the purview of this capstone. Franklin Pierce College uses its alumni site to collect or update information about alumni, provide information on career planning links to resources like jobs, fundraising information, alumni activities etc. The Mercy College equally uses its alumni site to report on alumni events like reunions, fundraising, update of alumni information etc. For the benefit of this capstone, it can be observed that for both of these colleges the functionalities on their alumni sites are still under development. Low-tech solutions are used to collect information on alumni updates with no online system of accessing and modifying existing data, avoiding bogus or duplicate information being entered. A form is provided on the site where information can be entered which is probably sent to an email address and later manually entered to the information storage. Mercy College's alumni directory which reports on alumni life events exists as a static html page meaning that the pages have to be changed whenever an update is to be reported. Both of them are yet to implement an online information update. However these sites still provide lessons for the Persons School site in terms of the amount of information and activities that involve alumni like reunions. This capstone intends to benefit from alumni sites of other schools to implement functionalities that would enable Persons School alumni make online updates of their personal information which will mean having access to online databases and access controls. Alumni will be able to perform multi select queries to search for specific alumni. 2.4 Stakeholders
2.4 Roles and Responsibilities1. Claudine Keenan Director of Academic programs at the Persons School is the capstone sponsor. She will be responsible for communicating the overall objectives and scope of the project. 2. Ian Kozack Director of Information Technology will be responsible for offering technical guidance at the implementation phase 3. Beth Armor will be the capstone advisor and will be responsible for providing feedback during the entire process. 4. Victoria Mathews Will be responsible drafting copy for the Alumni news 5. Alison will also be responsible for publishing Alumni news 6. Justin Grotelueschen together with alumni will be responsible for providing feedback during the development process 7. Alumni, will be responsible for providing feedback during the development process 8. Richard Muyingo will be responsible for implementation of the functionalities Before I joined the Persons School I had almost 9 years experience working with the Uganda Bureau of Statistics some of which were in developing computer applications for different purposes. These experiences together with the skills that I have acquired at The Persons School (eg. participating in team work) and those that iam still learning (e.g. developing web applications) will be useful in accomplishing this project 2.5 Communication PlanA fair amount of communication will be done via email because some of the people involved are in diverse places. However since I have frequent access to the Persons School, I will try to set up face-to-face meeting with my sponsor as frequently as possible. A parallel form of communication will be set up with my advisor in order not to compromise the academic process. 2.6 RisksBecause of the diversity of people involved and the kind of expectations that are involved in this project, it may be difficult to keep the activities within a manageable scope yet satisfy the interests of all concerned. Implementation of the functionalities will require support from the Persons in as far as write access to the website is concerned, use of existing templates as and when this can be done will be very crucial to the timing of activities. Here I will try to work around existing schedules yet be persistent and proactive enough to accomplish the tasks on time.
2.8 AssumptionsI assume that I will be able to get timely feedback and support from all persons involved I assume that we will be able to agree on a reasonable scope for the project to the satisfaction of all persons involved.
2.6 Deliverables
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