If you don’t organize a project well, forget about it being a success.

Projects boil down into three tasks:

• Requirements. What are the system’s goals?
• Model. Describe the system you want to build.
• Build. Do it.

You don’t do these tasks in strict order. Maybe when you’re building, you realize that one of the requirements doesn’t make sense. It’s common to go back and revise an earlier tasks.

Specify requirements

The worst thing you can do is not write down the system’s goals. The second worst thing is to keep the goals to yourself. Share the goals with people who have a stake in the IS, and see if there’s agreement.

If you don’t talk to others, then you’ll end up with a system that does such-and-such, when it should be doing so-and-so. In other words, you’ll have wasted your time.

Who for?

List the stakeholders. For example:

• Those paying for the system
• Those who’ll use the system
• You

Stakeholder goals

Ask stakeholders what they want from the IS.

You’re asking them to do a difficult task. Say you ask a sales rep what she wants from a customer tracking system. The rep has never had a customer tracking system before. You’re asking her to imagine what it would be like to use something that doesn’t exist. That’s hard to get right.

Make prototypes of the system. The first prototype might be just drawings of screens and reports. You ask the rep what she thinks of it. She has something she can evaluate.

You take her feedback, and make the next prototype. Maybe there’s some real software this time, but with just one or two of the most important functions. The rep looks at that prototype, and gives you more feedback. Keep doing this until you and the rep are confident that you know what the system should do.

Beware of scope creep. A project starts out small. “Let’s add this,” someone says. “Hey, it would cool to do this thing,” says another. Soon, your project takes twice as long as you thought it would.

Model the system

Models describe what the system does, and how it works. There are a bunch of modeling technique in IS. The ones you use depends on what kind of IS you’re building:

For an information collection site:

• Page hierarchy model – what pages will be in the IS?
• Look-and-feel model – what does it feel like to use the IS?

For conversational systems, add:

• Interaction model – how will users interact with each other and with the system? What will they say? How will they know what others said?

For applications, add:

• Data model – what entities will the IS store data about? What are their attributes? How are they related?
• Workflow model – how are tasks done?

Build it

Install Drupal. Install modules and themes. Create roles. Make content types. Make views. Assign permissions. Customize menus. Place blocks. Etc., etc.