Planning and Deadlines

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  1. PLANNING AND DEADLINES

Purpose of planning

For an information technology project to go smoothly, it must be planned well. Without such planning the project might not be completed in the time available or it might be over budget. To be able to plan a project successfully, it is necessary to break it down into a series of smaller tasks and determine the order of which these smaller tasks need to be done. The time and resources needed for each of these smaller tasks also need to be estimated. The tasks then need to be divided among the other team members.

Deadlines

A deadline is a date set by the senior management of a company, by which the project should be completed or reach a certain predetermined milestone. The milestones or mileposts mark the end of logical stages in the project, and their main purpose is to establish whether the project is on time or not.

In business deadlines are very important and everyone involved in the project needs to be constantly aware of them. Planning activities should be centred on achieving the preset deadlines.

  1. Consistent layout, spaces, tabs and indents

Consistent layout and spacing

It is possible to alter the way a document looks by formatting all or part of it. Most documents are typed with single spacing, which has no blank lines between the lines of typed texts. Double spacing is often used if a document needs to be sent for another person’s comments or for editing as it leaves a line of space between each line of text for the reader to insert comments.

Tabs  

Most packages have default tab positions and if these are not suitable, tab functions can be set manually in advanced you can move text to the present position simply by pressing the tab key rather than pressing the space bar repeatedly and hoping that you can align text accurately. Tabs can be useful when arranging columns.

Indents

Indents are sometimes used when starting a new paragraph and this involves starting the first word of the paragraph a few characters to the right of the usual margin. Other types of indents include hanging indents where the first line keeps the usual margin but following lines are indented.

1.3 Sensible filenames, why?

The filename is just the first part of the file and is referred to the main related to what is in the documents. It is necessary to have a reasonable file name because it is quicker to find your documents, and that you don’t have to look through all the filenames to get a certain file.

1.4 File structure, storage of files, and directory, why?

Folder structure

MS-DOS uses a hierarchical or tree file structure. To understand how this file structure works, it is necessary to understand what is meant by file, directory and subdirectory.

 

Storage of files

A file is a unit of storage on a computer. Some files are program files, which can be on the computers to perform a task, whereas other files are documents, storing data in one form or another. All file stored using MS-DOS are given file names, and the file name ought to bare some resemblance to what is stored in the file. As you store more and more programs and data on a hard drive you can very soon have several thousand files. Keep these in some kind of organisation structure is extremely important and it is here that the operating system can help.

Directory

Directories are used to group together files containing similar materials. For instance a directory could be set up for games, another for word processing software and yet another for letters. When a disk is formatted using MS-DOS, a root directory is created on the disk and from this root other subdirectories can be specified.

Creating a directory

Suppose you want to create a directory called ‘games’, this could be done using the command md games. Notice that the command prompt now changes to C:games>. If you now type dir at the command prompt, you get a list of all the files in the games directory.

Removing a directory

You can only remove a directory if there are no files contained in it. If there are files in it they must all be deleted first. For example, if you want to remove the games directory, not only must it be empty of files but you must also be in the root directory. The command for removing the games directory is rm games.

Coping files

For this you use the copy command, which has the format copy (source destination). The source needs to specify the drive and directory of the file to be copied; the destination needs to specify the drive and the directory to which the file is to be copied. The following command shows this agreement:

copy a:task1.doc c:\mydocs

1.5 Log of ICT problems and how will you solve them

Join now!

While you are logging off ICT you are sometimes likely to get problems, if in this matter you should either try and solve the problem by reading the notice that the computer is telling you and do that or ask politely to your teacher for help. However you should not do anything that you don’t understand, as this may cause more problems.

 

 

2.1 Copyright of data

Data paid for or collected by one organisation may ...

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