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University of Montana Project Management Class seeking Technology Projects for Students

The Project Management class in the School of Business at UM is the senior capstone course for Management Information Systems majors. Teams of students in the class work to create information systems solutions to help businesses or non-profits to solve problems. The students utilize project management techniques to manage the project while keeping it on time, on task, and on budget. The class instructor provides guidance, but the teams are responsible to analyze, design, and complete the project. Examples of projects include developing websites, databases, smartphone apps, and writing business applications in Visual Basic, Asp.Net, or PHP. Other project may involve transferring data from various sources to a new application or implementing open-source applications to help manage business processes.

Here are the specifics on the class and sponsoring a project:

* The class teaches the students techniques for managing projects. They will be creating a number of project management documents based on requirements they get from the sponsor during meetings or other communication. The student teams generally do a great job. I will give them guidance along the way, but the team of students will be responsible for completing the project.

* Sponsors must create a short description of the project to distribute to the teams so they can pick the project they want to work on. This can be as little as one paragraph and as much as one page. The project should take 240 to 300 hours with 50% of the time spent on planning and developing documentation. The teams can create websites, databases, smartphone apps, and write business applications in Visual Basic or Asp.Net. They also have the skills to implement open-source web or application technologies to help manage business processes. The professor will work with the team to make sure the scope of work can be done in the 240 to 300 hours.

* Sponsors must agree to meet with the teams to provide guidance on the project. This will be at least one meeting at the beginning of the semester and periodic meetings throughout the rest of the semester. The students must keep the sponsor informed of progress on the project on a weekly basis.

* Sponsors (or a representative of the sponsor) must attend the 30-minute final presentation, which will be in the morning on May 6th from 12:40 to 2:00pm or May 7th from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. There is flexibility to pick the presentation slot that works best for the sponsors.

* Sponsors must fill out a short evaluation of the students’ work at the end of the semester, which will help the professor in assigning a grade to the project.

* One caveat to remember is that the student teams are given the option to pick which project they want to work on and there is no guarantee that your project will be selected. The professor has not had great results when student teams were assigned projects so giving them the option to select the project they want works best.

All that is needed to proceed is a short a project description (one or two paragraphs). Students will pick their projects the week of February 2 to 6 and will start contacting sponsors the following week. Please send inquiries to [email protected] or call 406-243-5985.

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