Exercise Notes

Learning goals

  • Begin writing your project plan

Writing a project plan

You will work with your manager and devise, with our help, a project plan that sees you doing tasks as part of your day job across the next 9 weeks (taking half a day per week and the whole 9th week to complete your project report) which will demonstrate your ability to perform in all the relevant areas. Your project is to be based around a customer’s or stakeholder’s specification that responds to:

  • a specific problem
  • a recurring issue
  • an idea/opportunity

It’s important to have ensured that the project can meet all KSBs.

The project plan is roughly one A4 (500 words). A good format for it is:

  • Short introduction
    • Establish the project with one or two sentences
    • Include the team you will be working with, and your role within that team
  • Stakeholders specification
    • Go into more depth about what the project is doing
    • State what this project will achieve
    • State how success will be measured for the project
  • High level implementation plan
    • Detail implementation of the project
    • Make sure you cover KSBs below
  • A mapping guide demonstrating how you’ll meet the KSBs.
    • This can be done as a separate document, and should serve to demonstrate that your project is suitable for the work based project.
    • You can use a table, with one column listing the KSB (not just the reference, but the full description), one column called “project mapping” that contains a sentence or two per KSB that identifies how you will hit this KSB.

KSBs

If you’re keen to see the full list, all the Knowledge, Skills and Behaviour (KSB) criteria can be viewed on the Institute For Apprenticeships documentation with those to be checked as part of this project listed in the EPA standard.

In order to gain a pass in the work based project you must meet the following criteria:

  • Explains the roles and responsibilities of all people working within the software development lifecycle, and how they relate to the project (K2)
  • Outlines how teams work effectively to produce software and how to contribute appropriately (K6)
  • Outlines and applies the rationale and use of algorithms, logic and data structures. (K9, S16)
  • Reviews methods of software design with reference to functional/technical specifications and applies a justified approach to software development (K11, S11, S12)
  • Creates logical and maintainable code to deliver project outcomes, explaining their choice of approach. (S1)
  • Analyses unit testing results and reviews the outcomes correcting errors. (S4)
  • Identifies and creates test scenarios which satisfy the project specification (S6)
  • Applies structured techniques to problem solving to identify and resolve issues and debug basic flaws in code (S7)
  • Reviews and justifies their contribution to building, managing and deploying code into the relevant environment in accordance with the project specification (S10)
  • Establishes a logical thinking approach to areas of work which require valid reasoning and/or justified decision making (B2)
  • Describes how they have maintained a productive, professional and secure working environment throughout the project activity (B3)

In order to gain a distinction in the work based project you must meet the following criteria:

  • Compare and contrast the requirements of a software development team, and how they would ensure that each member (including themselves) were able to make a contribution (K6)
  • Evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of different coding and programming techniques to create logical and maintainable code (S1)
  • Analyses the software to identify and debug complex issues using a fix that provides a permanent solution. (S7)
  • Evaluates different software development approaches in order justifying the best alignment with a given paradigm (for example, object oriented, event driven or procedural) (S11)