The development of a final year project management system for information technology programmes

Abstract

This project tries to develop an online platform which facilitates the final year projects (FYP) process implemented by our information technology programme. The whole FYP is a year-long process involving groups of students and their supervisors to accomplish a theme based project. It is very necessary to employ the latest technologies in order to allow different parties to contribute and communicate more efficiently. Therefore, we have designed and developed a comprehensive web-based system to better support the three kinds of users; they are the FYP programme organizer (PO), project supervisors and the project group members.

Before the academic year starts, PO will have to assign project topics according to the preferences and academic record of the formed project groups. This is a tedious and error prone task to manually complete the allocation of projects. The system is therefore useful to help PO to arrange project selection and allocation procedure, as well as helping the students to submit their preferences and group member information. During the academic year, the system would provide different functionalities for the PO to collect student’s assessments and markers’ scores via the submission and grading module.

Project supervisors will also be able to employ the system for keep tracking the progress of the projects with the use of the project management tools, and online chat function. Both the students and supervisors will be benefited from these functionalities and allow the project to run more smoothly even face-to-face meetings are not held very frequently.

Project group members themselves are provided with similarly effective communication tools to allow easy of discussion on project issues among members. Moreover, they can share resources about the project including source code and data files using our online repository.