DRAFT OF RESEARCH WORK

1. Implementation Plan

Assignment 3 was carried out in three phases:

Phase 1: Planning stage

This included establishing the prototype requirements:
• SWOT Analysis
• Work Breakdown Structure
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Communication Plan

Phase 2: Prototype Development and Implementation

The criteria used for building the prototype was to create a networking community for people of all ages who love sailing. This networking community will target the Australian audience making possible for the members of this community to share information, stories, pictures and meet people with similar interests. Furthermore this networking community will provide information on sailing events such as boat racing, boat exhibitions, etc.

This networking community will promote co-operation and relationships between the members.
The community is hosted in one group member's computer at home. The server is quite old but operational.

Server info: Intel pentium2 400Mhz with 640MB of RAM. 80GB Harddisk
Internet Connection Speed: 512/128
Maximum speed: around 12Kbps.

Phase 3: Sociability Testing with Client Team

Once the implementation of the prototype has been completed testing will be carried out to confirm that the prototype is working as expected and that all the functionality required for the members to socialize is in place.

2. Communications Tools Used

The group mainly communicated via email, discussion board, and Virtual Classroom.

Email provided a good tracking tool as it records the time and date each email was sent. This allows every member to ensure that they are posting their work on time and be able to follow up the rest of the group’s progress. Therefore, every member of the group would be able to check the progress of the assignment.

During the completion of assignment 3 the discussion board was also used to post each completed task, this tool was used as a database which stored information related to the assignment as such as work completed by group members at various project implementation stages.

The virtual class room will be used by the group for the online discussion and presentation. With virtual class room, member can have online meeting regardless of the place. Hence, provides convenient way for group collaboration.

3. Collaboration

At the planning stage of the assignment the “Work Breakdown Structure” was developed and tasks were distributed among the group members. The majority of the group members completed their tasks in a timely manner. There was also feedback and collaboration from the client group which turn out to be very useful for the implementation of project.

The main issue confronted by the group members was the difficulty to meet physically due to group member’s commitments. It was not possible to organize a meeting for all the group members. However the tools mentioned in section 2 have proven to be very effective to enable all the group members to complete their tasks and keep track of the progress of the assignment even though there was no meetings held along the implementation of the project.

However it was difficult to divide the tasks equally between the group members because the bulk of the work was “the implementation of the prototype”. This could only be completed by one group members at the most. Therefore the tasks were distributed unevenly.

4. Time Management

Below is time used to complete each task base on WBS