ATTENTION
TELECOM SENIOR PROJECT POTENTIALS

Early Notice for all Telecom Juniors

All TCOM students who plan to register for TCM490 Senior Project need to be aware of important procedures associated with the Senior Project. Please read this article and keep your eyes open for further announcements!

The Senior Project provides two main functions.

• The Senior Project is a capstone for the Telecommunciations Management Degree. It provides a frame work for a "real world" project that combines the management and information technology concepts presented during the Program.

• The Senior Project provides the final assessment point for the telecom program as a four-year college degree.

It allows student formed teams to consult and perform in a live environment, often on production networks. The Senior Project Course Outline is conducted completely different from any other course. The Senior Project provides the closest experience to a real-world project as possible. It is highly recommended that students join a professional networking organization such as the AITP, IEEE, or MATA as soon as possible during their program. Most projects, as in the real world, will require teams to be cross-functional and multi-diciplined in order to meet the needs of the clients. These organizations will provide you with professional networks to find teammates from other disciplines as well as other sections of your own program.

The Senior Project course has the same expectation in committed studies and time as any other university level course; however, the student become responsibles for tracking and justifying their efforts.

The Senior Project is a minimal contact course in which project teams work under their own initiative to locate, design, track and report on a project. Almost all communications between the project manager and the project coordinator are accomplished via the Internet: ftp, email, instant messaging, chat, and possibly BBS.

• Project teams maximize their effort by working on the project deliverables which is not necessitated by a class room attendance.
• Today's Internet and other services provide effective tools for communications and collaboration of projects and learning.
• Each team communicates with the Senior Project Coordinator, Porject Mentor and Client under an organized structure (figure 1: Course Organizational Chart). This produces a small virtual class with a high professor to student ratio. The professor can disseminate the collective learning through mass communication tools.
• "The process of learning is collaborative and uses tools common to the to the business world." This fits in with the Dean's Strategic Priorities to "increase the use of appropriate technologies to enhance the instructional delivery of our program and increase student learning."

Each team also will identify a faculty mentor to advise them: Project mentor. Figure 1 shows the Senior Project Course Organizational Chart .

A large portion of the grade is relate to "general education" skills: professional writing, reporting, project planning and tracking, troubleshooting, and customer support. The team project environment encourages a demonstration of theses abilities.

Questions.

1. For a course that has 6 total hours for lab and class, how much scheduled time do you spend in class and lab for the entire term?
2. For a class that has 6 total hours for lab and class, how much time are you expected to contribute to your studies per term?
3. During a project life cycle, where are the most work-hours contributed?
4. Do you know everything yet?
5. How is your learning curve for new tasks and materials?
6. How is your professional writing skill?
7. How are your project management skills?

The Heavy Hitters for Senior Project

Time constraints seem to rack the nerves of more projects than necessary. Let's look at some figures. A course that has four hours of class and two hours of lab will total approximately eighty-four hours of attendance during the term. Most universities expect students to contribute 1½ to 2 hours of outside study and research for every hour in class or lab; thus, our example course would require 15 - 18 hours of contribution every week. Independant study assumptions are 40 hours per credit hour. This comes to approximately three-hundred-thirty-six hours of contribution for the term. I'll jump on a limb and guess that most students get a D in this area.

Team efforts greatly reduce the time of any particular project to be completed. It's called sharing! Teams require organization and management to be effective. Let's assume again. A five-person team has each person contributing their entire time to the project effort. Based on the above figure, what is the total time in the project for a fourteen-week life cycle? It would be 1,260 hours! Most projects get an F according to these figures.

Don't fret over these figures! It is not on what you are being graded. However, you should be aware that Senior Project might force you to push this contribution of time more than any other class. The above examples has each member contributing 252 hours. Your grades are based on quality more than quantity.

Projects generally have the major part of work accomplished in the middle of the life cycle. Usually around mid-term, your project may be calling for more time while you are desperately studying for mid-term exams. The time project members can contribute becomes scarces, you begin to miss deadlines (taboo) on the project and for Senior Project class and you critical path begins to extend into another term! You had hoped to graduate this term. L

Some Advice & Notes

Don't over burden yourself in credit hours during your senior project term.

Be ready and start your project early. It will take time to locate and obtain a project request. The school is not responsible for providing you with project leads or projects; however, we do have some. You must have a project by the end of the first week of the term. You can obtain a project prior to the start of the term; in which case, once your project request has been approved, you can start week-1 of your project regardless of the school term.

That's it for now. Senior Project Pre-Term Orientation will be held in Week-14. A notice of the times and place will be available during general registration.