week1-Define The Project

Reading this chapter reminds me a lot of basic knowledge I’d learned about business administration such as production and operation management, marketing management, human resource management, research & development management, finance management and information management. From external to internal factors, a project needs lots of works in order to cover all details.

This book highlights the part of client survey, which is a quite useful tool to know what you client wants before and after they adopt our production. Before we start to design our website, we could know people’s needs and their user behaviors from client survey. And then after they access our website, the survey could focus on the feedback and their experiences.

Then the author moved into the part of understanding your audience. In my college (I majored in journalism), my teachers always told us to find our target audience, after that, you will know your main direction and content.

“The Web is all about the audience.” You need to know what needs, capabilities, wants, and fickle characteristics of your audience. And there is always a point we have to pay attention. As to access the Internet, a certain quality of technical equipments and skills your audiences have to own. Thus, we can narrow down and focus on our target audience.

At the end, Chapter 3 talks about how to create a project plan, which is the exact part I what to learn from this class. After doing all the researches, it’s about the time to startup. The book offers many details of how to do including making the budget, creating a schedule, assigning the team, planning user tests etc..

It’s a good tool book which offers lots detail examples; I think I could learn a lot from the book and other materials in this class.