Writing Examples

"Culture in organizations refers to traditions, humor, values,and unspoken rules that are present within an organization. It is important to understand what workplace culture is because once you find a new job chances are you will not know many people personally. This means you will often find yourself feeling uncomfortable. However, if you strive to learn more about the workplace; what name the boss likes to be addressed as for example, will be a great place to start. Not only will it be a conversation starter, but it shows that you are making a genuine effort to adapt to your new work environment, which is a positive in the eyes of your co workers. In conclusion, the more you know about the environment your in the greater your odds of succeeding will be; The more you know about your job the most productive you will most likely be."

Greetings Mr. Smith,

I hope you are well. My name is Ashari Elliott and I am the project leader of the UALR development team that will develop your website for the Boys and Girls Club of Central Arkansas. We would like to arrange a time to meet with you at your earliest convenience to discuss your website. If at all possible we would like to hold the first meeting on August 27th, 2019 at 1:30 PM in room 635 of the EIT building. A parking pass will be provided to you and a member of our team will escort you to the building. If you have any concerns about the meeting time please feel free to contact me. We look forward to hearing from you!

Thank you,

Ashari Elliott

This is a reflection on the student project I completed this semester. I enjoyed working on this project very much. I came into the project with a couple fears. One being that I won’t be skilled enough to finish the project and contribute to the group and the second was delivering the project and meeting the needs of the client. By the end of the project I realized that I had nothing to worry about. The results of the project were not as outstanding as I had hoped for ( there were a few unfinished areas ) but I was still very proud of the work my team and I put into it. Speaking of my team, I could not have asked for a better group of people to develop a website with. Melody, Jeremy, and Anabella were all very motivated, driven, and positive throughout the entire process which made things much less stressful. Each of them are very talented and I hope that I can work with them again in the future.

A couple things I learned from this experience and I plan to carry over with me to future projects include: the importance of responsiveness and communication. While developing this site a notice that I did not start thinking about how things would appear on screens of different sizes until the very last stages of development and it really came back to bite me. I will definitely have to spend building my skills and knowledge on responsiveness. As for communication, building a website on your own versus working with a team is very different. When designing/developing on my own I did not have to check in with anyone when I wanted to make changes. However, when working with my team I had to train myself to let my team in on what I was doing even with the smallest of changes. This is a good practice because it keeps everyone on the same page and keeps down confusion.

Capstone Reflection

My team and I were given the task of developing a new website for the Boys and Girls Club of Central Arkansas. The goal for the project was to improve upon the site's mobility,aesthetics, and functionality. I served as the project manager for the team where my responsiblities were to interface with management as required, inquire for resources,delegate responsibilities within the team of the project, and to communicate with management, as required, to ensure successful and timely completion of the project. I was also responsible for developing the project plan, monitoring the schedule, and scope of the project during implementation, and maintaining control over the project by measuring performance and taking corrective action.

Thankfully during the development process no major challenges arose;the challenges we did encounter were mostly technical. Given the limited amount of time we had, we decided that using a pre-built theme was better than building the site from the ground up. As a result, we were working in an environment we knew very little about, and we quickly discovered the theme's limitations and had some difficulty overcoming them. For instance, we wanted to include a drop down menu in the navigation bar. Initially, we were convinced our theme did not allow drop downs to be used, but still we continued to find a solution. We eventually resolved this issue by scourig through the theme customization settings until we figured it out.Getting to know the theme a little better also allowed us to improve the website's design. Another issue we encountered was deciding how we were going to structure the content. We were not provided a lot of content to use, so this was difficult at first. We considered giving most of the content its on page, but that resulted in numerous pages and a lot of empty space on some pages.We solved this issue by placing related content on the same page, which made it easier to find and made the pages appear more complete.

I have been part of plenty of teams in the past, but I learn something useful everytime I work with others on a project. One personal thing I learned about myself is that I am more confident working as a developer rather than a projcet manager. I have never actually led a project of this magnitude before, so in the beginning I was more concerned with how to lead rather than actually accomplishing the tasks of a project manager. There were also several times were I felt like I wasn't contributing as much as I could be because my development abilities are stronger than my leadership abilites. Although in the end this project was a success, I learned that I need to spend some time learning how to lead. One last useful thing I took from this process was experience with a content managment system (WordPress). Prior to this project I had never worked with one before and there was a learning curve. I learned that knowing how to use a content management system to develop sites is just as important as having the knowledge to build one from the ground up.

If I could go back to the beginning before we started the project I would set all the content and discussion of how were going to develop the site and learn everything there was to know about the theme we used. I believe we did a great job with the site, but I also feel we could have accomplished more if we knew what the theme was capabalbe of.