Example Use - Coordinating Small Groups

Bobby Buntin, a student at North Carolina State University, wrote in to tell us how a group he was working with had successfully used ProjectForum in a major project. We asked him if he could share details about how his team had used ProjectForum to help them, and here is what he had to say:

We had a group of 8 people designing a "start-up company" to offer online ordering to local restaurants. 4 of us were designing the software and graphics, and 4 were conducting market research and testing. I worked on a similar project last spring, and I received about 40 e-mails a day related to the project, so I wanted a better way to communicate within our group.

The class required us to keep agendas and minutes of weekly meetings, weekly status reports on all group members, and labor hours.

We also gave 3 presentations to our "investors," so we would use ProjectForum to coordinate preparation for those presentations, posting our business plans, project plans, powerpoint presentations, and PHP code from the site. We created a page for each presentation, and by the day of the presentation, we usually had 30 documents posted on the page along with discussions.

We had all our members post the results of their interviews with local restaurants, ideas for logos, t-shirt designs, brainstorming ideas for product features, and bug reports.

ProjectForum made it possible for 8 very busy people to stay on the same page and complete our project on-time. We are considering marketing our product within the next year. Thanks to ProjectForum, I only received 3 or 4 project related e-mails each day, and I could easily track what my team members were doing at any given time.

Sample Screen Shots

(Click for full size)	Home Page The group's home page serves as a table of contents, providing direct links to all the important work products, notes and discussions. An announcements area highlights an upcoming event, and points to a pre-planning area for the event.
(Click for full size)	Team Status The team keeps track of status for each week on its own page. People can update their tasks, and link to or attach copies of works in progress. Everyone can always see at a glance what has been done, what people are working on, etc. without requiring a constant flurry of emails.
(Click for full size)	Design Review An initial image for a design is placed on the page, and then team members use the comments facility to post their reactions and ideas. Subsequent or related designs can also be added or attached.
(Click for full size)	Meeting Notes A page for each team meeting is setup, containing an agenda that can be prepared ahead of time and tweaked as needed. Meeting minutes provide a record of the meeting, that can also be augmented over time if needed. Templates make it easy to create similar pages for each meeting, filling in the specific details as needed.

Read other people's experiences with CourseForum and ProjectForum.