Example Projects¶

The course needs concrete projects to reason about. This page defines the small set of illustrative example projects reused across all the lessons, so that examples stay consistent instead of being invented afresh in every module.

These are synthetic scenarios, not real case studies

Every project on this page is a composite written for teaching. None describes a real organisation, product, team, or outcome. No statistic, quotation, or result on this page or in any lesson is a claim about the real world.

The numbers used in worked examples (budgets, durations, defect counts, salaries) are invented for illustration. They are arithmetically consistent so that you can follow the method, and they are always labelled. Never cite them.

How to use these examples¶

Lessons apply the technique under discussion to one or two of these projects.
Labs ask you to do the same on one of them, or on your own capstone idea.
Case studies in Case Studies use the Campus Event Portal, which is a smaller sibling of these.

You are encouraged to substitute your own project. The point of an example is to give you something concrete to calculate with, not to be authoritative.

The example projects¶

Each entry gives the situation, the stakeholders, and the constraints that make it interesting for project management.

1. University learning management system (LMS)¶


What it is	A web platform where instructors publish course materials, set assignments, and post grades; students submit work and track progress
Who wants it	A mid-sized university's teaching and learning office
Why it is a useful example	Many diverse users, term-driven deadlines, accessibility requirements, and a migration from existing tools

Constraints that matter: the academic calendar is immovable; accessibility standards apply; some instructors are enthusiastic and others resistant; existing course material must migrate; exam-period load is a hard peak.

Good for teaching: stakeholder analysis, non-functional requirements, change control, release planning around fixed dates.

2. Hospital appointment system¶


What it is	Software for patients to book, reschedule, and cancel clinic appointments, replacing a phone-and-paper process
Who wants it	A hospital's outpatient department
Why it is a useful example	Safety-critical context, strict regulation, multiple clinical roles, and a strong resistance to disruption

Constraints that matter: downtime during clinic hours is unacceptable; patient data is sensitive; clinicians and administrators have conflicting priorities; the existing process must keep working during rollout.

Good for teaching: risk management, quality assurance, verification versus validation, stakeholder conflict, phased rollout.

3. E-commerce platform¶


What it is	An online store with catalogue, basket, payments, order tracking, and returns
Who wants it	A growing retailer moving beyond a physical shop
Why it is a useful example	Commercial pressure, third-party payment dependencies, seasonal demand, and constant feature requests

Constraints that matter: revenue-critical launch window; payment provider integration controlled by someone else; traffic spikes at sale events; the business wants everything in the first release.

Good for teaching: scope management, prioritisation, vendor management, estimation under commercial pressure, scope creep.

4. Mobile banking application¶


What it is	A mobile app for account balances, transfers, bill payments, and card management
Who wants it	A retail bank's digital division
Why it is a useful example	Security and regulatory constraints, high user expectations, and a large existing back-end that cannot be changed freely

Constraints that matter: security review before release; regulatory approval; legacy core banking integration; a single failure damages trust; frequent small releases wanted.

Good for teaching: compliance constraints, quality and security review gates, cost of delay, metrics, release management.

5. Data analytics dashboard¶


What it is	A dashboard that shows an organisation's operational metrics, refreshed regularly, with drill-down and export
Who wants it	A university's planning office, or a company's operations team
Why it is a useful example	Requirements are genuinely unclear at the start, data quality is unknown, and "done" is hard to define

Constraints that matter: nobody can specify the requirements precisely until they see something; the underlying data is messy; performance expectations are high; the audience disagrees about which measures matter most.

Good for teaching: iterative delivery, prototyping, eliciting requirements from stakeholders who cannot articulate them, definition of done, measurement design.

6. University admission portal¶


What it is	An online application portal for prospective students, with document upload, fee payment, and status tracking
Who wants it	A university's admissions office
Why it is a useful example	Extremely seasonal workload, hard deadlines, high public visibility, and heavy integration with existing systems

Constraints that matter: the application window is fixed by policy and cannot move; peak load for a few weeks a year; applicants are external and non-technical; failure is publicly visible.

Good for teaching: fixed-date planning, capacity planning, scheduling, phased delivery under a hard deadline, contingency planning.

7. Inventory management system¶


What it is	Stock tracking, reorder points, supplier records, and stock reporting for a warehouse or a campus stores department
Who wants it	Operations management
Why it is a useful example	Data migration from spreadsheets, integration with suppliers, and a clear return on investment that is easy to compute

Constraints that matter: existing spreadsheets hold years of inconsistent data; supplier systems vary in capability; staff must keep working during transition; benefits accrue slowly.

Good for teaching: business cases and cost–benefit analysis, data migration risk, earned value, benefits realisation.

8. Public service information system¶


What it is	A website and content system publishing government or municipal service information, eligibility rules, and forms
Who wants it	A public authority
Why it is a useful example	Procurement and contracts are central, accessibility is legally required, and the audience is the general public

Constraints that matter: work is contracted to an external supplier; open standards and accessibility are mandatory; scope is set by policy rather than by users; budget is fixed annually.

Good for teaching: procurement, contracts, vendor management, accessibility as a non-functional requirement, governance.

Choosing an example¶

If the lesson is about…	A good example is…
Requirements and scope	Analytics dashboard (unclear requirements) or LMS (many users)
Scheduling under a fixed date	Admission portal or LMS
Risk	Hospital appointment system or inventory migration
Quality and verification	Banking app or hospital system
Estimation	E-commerce platform or inventory system
Measurement and control	Any of them
Procurement and contracts	Public service information system
Distributed teams	Banking app (multi-site) or public service system

A note on reuse¶

Reusing the same eight projects across the course is deliberate:

it removes the effort of re-reading a new scenario in every lesson,
it lets you see how one project would be managed differently at each stage, and
it keeps comparisons honest, because the situation does not change while the technique does.

The single most common weakness in self-study is doing each exercise in a fresh, unrelated scenario and never seeing the parts connect. Using one project end to end is how you avoid it.