Promotional Schedule

As part of my change management class and also part of this capstone I am working with RYT to create a promotion schedule. I just completed a first draft and e-mailed to the key sponsors, to spur some discussion and help with the effort of thinking through when promotional efforts should begin. This is a top level document with not a lot of task based elements defined as yet. I merely want to encourage feedback and discussion around the schedule.

To view the document:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3475167/RYT-Production-Schedule-and-Calendar-2008

eventually, I hope to have the promotion schedule on the calendar of the new website
For now I hope to gather feedback and revise to the next level of detail. Then assign resources to each task.

Friday - re-evaluate progress

I had another disappointment with the project this week, I had hoped to show some progress to the stakeholders today, but due to more technical difficulties was unable to do so and had to re-schedule the meeting. I am now reviewing the schedule and trying to prepare a new schedule which I will give to my programmer and ask for her commitment to the delivery dates specified.

I am also proceeding with creating wireframes and gathering and preparing content for the site.
The process so far has not been what I had hoped and I will be documenting my progress and the steps I have and will be taking to deal with the issues.

It is difficult to seperate out the academic expectations of this capstone from the actual deliverable that I have promised....but I see that is what I should focus on.

Style guide on Scribd

Okay this seems like the quickest work around I could find - to provide the full document.
I have posted the file on Scribd a document sharing community...interesting site, another use for social media networking!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3320755/RYT-StyleGuide

RYT Style Guide

Just finished the Style Guide for the RYT theatre website. This is a document I created years ago when working in the corporate web department at Merck. I actually created most of their documentation used there for managing production, assets and orienting new hires. I guess it was the result of too much unnecessary chaos...I had to keep track of many thing and make sure the information was accessible to everyone at anytime.
I will probably revise this document as we progress with the site. Also the fact that Joomla and CSS are being used may add more information that should be tracked. This is the document I am using to relay information to my programmer.
I don't think I can attach a document here so I will try and save a sample page and post as an image.

Not much progress

This week I am trying to balance the time consuming efforts of looking for a new job and working on all of my school work, including my capstone. I am assigned to work with an outplacement service, Lee Hecht Harrison. working on the assignments and attending the teleconferences is taking about 30 hours a week and can be come all consuming. It requires a lot of writing, self-examination and research.

As far as my capstone project, I still have not seen much progress on the site being built in Joomla. I will check in again with my programmer and hope to have something to show my stake holders by this friday at our face to face meeting. I just found out about another possible way to program the site if the joomla site does not happen. Someone I know has created a site using Yahoo and this allows them to go in and edit the content, although there are limitations to what can be done on the site. I am looking into Google aps as another possibility, just in case!

the work breakdown schedule and the gantt chart are areas that I am uncertain how much to change the information contained within? and do I need to even do the gantt chart?

Capstone issues

I had a meeting with my stakeholders friday May 30th at 9am. I was hopefull that since we had an agenda we would be able to work through creating a production calendar for the year. Unfortunately, some of the key people were not able to stay beyond 9:30 am which was not enough time to gather the information needed. It was also difficult to keep everyone on task.

I did manage to gather some dates for when things were due and also to explain the importance of planning ahead and of sahring the information. Hopefully, this will sink in an everyone will realize the benefits of clear communication.

The next issue is the fact that much of my capstone is dependent on another person (programmer) this is really becoming a problem and perhaps I need to rewrite my proposal and all of my capstone documents to adjust this issue. I have so far not been able to get any work delivered from the other student. I am going to try and build the site myself in Joomla.
I need to review the schedule and perhaps I should discontinue having the other student work on this project. I'm not sure if that is feasible at this point...It is very disappointing when other people don't deliver their part of the work.
If this was a project I was managing in the work place I would have several ways to deal with this issue....but since this is a school project the incentive is not the same for each of us working on this project.

I am really frustrated by the lack of commitment I am experiencing both from my stakeholders and my programmer.