UCF Student Scholarship Website

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For my project engineering class, I worked with 7 graduate engineering of different backgrounds to brainstorm, discuss, analyze, conceptualize, and propose a working website for the customer (University of Central Florida) using the Project Management Lifecycle (Conception Phase, Definition Phase, Execution Phase, and Operation Phase). Our team known as the "Mindful Scholars" will be given a Request for Proposal (RFP), Statement of Work (SOW), and other design information that best meets all customer requirements. The objective of this project is to develop a comprehensive and user-friendly student scholarship website that is easy to use and won’t leave students feeling tired and frustrated. The website will allow students to easily search for scholarships based on their backgrounds, grades, ethnicity, and interests. My main responsibilities are project scheduler and technical documentation. Deliverables include:

• A fully functional student scholarship website
• Search feature for student backgrounds, interests, and information
• Updated scholarship opportunities 
• Elegant and user friendly 
• Secure user information 
• Printable search results 
• Scholarship hyperlinks 
• Website User’s Guide  
• Preliminary Design Review (PDR) 
• Critical Design Review (CDR) 
• Project Schedule 
• Risk Management
• Customer Meetings 
• Project Journals 

 The figure illustrates the milestones that will need to be met with their corresponding completion date. This schedule acts as a major checklist for the team to ensure the project will meet its minimum requirements and do so on time. The milestone schedule was developed from the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) that defined key aspects of the project into different sections. 

 The following is a critical path schedule used to organize, plan and track the activities that must be finished on time in order for the entire project to be complete. Using the critical path and integrating it with the remaining tasks of the project illustrates that due to the constraint of time, multiple tasks must be run at the same time to meet deadlines. With this schedule the team can gauge how each task should take and the reasonable amount of time and effort that needs to be put in each. Using this tool provides the team with insight on where to allocate resources and for how long. 

 The diagram shows the flow of the website design while also showing where the deliverable reports to the customer are. This diagram shows the steps the team must focus on to ensure the website is built properly to customer requirements. 

 The figure is the planned navigation of the website pages. Overall there will be three pages with one pop-up box for login. The main page will be the search screen; from here, you can navigate to all other windows and return to this window from any point on the website. Within each box, it lists functions each page must have.  

  The critical data will be the scholarship table, containing five pieces of information. The scholarship table will link up with three tags, allowing in-depth filtering. There will also be a location to store the password, enabling users to add and edit scholarships. No individual user login is needed. In the future, UCF will use an SSO login system to allow users to log in with their Microsoft account. 

   Since our initial design, we have changed direction entirely due to a request from the customer. The fundamental change stems from the customer requesting that a 3rd party host the site. Many of our changes accommodated our transfer to a third-party hosting service on Amazon Web Services, which I will refer to as AWS in the preceding section. Hosting is the leading change for all these decisions, as we went with AWS Amplify. Then to complement this, we split our database into two sections AWS Dynamo which holds the scholarship data, and AWS Cognito which stores the login details. We use AWS Lambda to communicate between these databases and the front end. On the front end, we switched to React, which, unlike the previous items, is not an AWS-based system. It does, however, receive more support from AWS than our last framework.