Post-Project One Thoughts
Our class was recently given the task of completing our first group project. The main objective of the project was to apply the skills/knowledge we’ve obtained thus far in a practical, workplace setting. The premise for the project was as follows: a toy manufacturer was expanding it’s offices to a new location and needed said location to be outfitted with a new, isolated network. Due to time constraint, completing the project require us to split into groups instead of doing the project alone.
Our group decided to split the workload between the five of us. My portion of project consisted of preparing the documentation and helping with the PowerShell scripting. Documentation for an IT project consists of writing out a set of instructions/procedures to follow in order to obtain some goal. The addition of screenshots/screen-grabs is a key facet to good documentation because it provides easy readability and allows laymen to easily replicate your methods.
My favorite component of the project would have to be the presentation. I feel that our group did a marvelous job presenting because we seemed to get the most excitement from the rest of the class. Even though a few of us voiced our concerns over nervousness and fear of public speaking, I feel we were able to show our proposal in a confident matter.
One aspect of the group project I didn’t like was the lack of ample time for preparation/deployment. I would of appreciated having more time to work on the project/prepare because I wasn’t able to fully understand/go through the entire project myself. It would have been nice to have completed all facets of the project but I understand the abbreviated time-frame, due to the length of our class/amount of material to cover.
For me, the most difficult part of the project was having to implement/understand concepts that we hadn’t covered in class and that we had a short time frame to prepare/deploy our plan of execution. I prefer to be well versed in something if I’m going to do a piece of work and I feel that we had inadequate time for everyone to know all intricacies. If it were up to me, I would make sure that we had more time for planning/actual deployment so that everyone involved felt comfortable should they have to do everything themselves.
Although the purpose of the group projects for our class is to implement skills/previous knowledge we’ve already obtained, it was refreshing to be forced to teach ourselves. As stated earlier, there were portions of the project we never reviewed in class (scripting/answer files) and the one topic that I feel I definitely learned from completing this project would have to be answer files.
Answer files are XML-based files that contain definitions/values that correspond or answer settings/preferences during the setup of Windows. Since one of the main goals of the project was being able to complete an unattended installation of the five servers, creating an answer file was an integral part of the project.
