IT4997 asks students to do the planning work that's easy to skip when excited to start building: rigorously scoping and designing an IT project before implementation begins, so that IT4998's execution phase builds on a solid, well-defined foundation.
Capstone project scoping and requirements
IT4997 begins with selecting and scoping an IT capstone project — ambitious enough to demonstrate genuine competency across multiple IT domains (networking, systems administration, databases, security, or development, depending on the student's focus), but realistically achievable within a single term. Students write formal functional and non-functional requirements defining exactly what the project must accomplish.
System design and technical planning
The course covers producing the technical design deliverables — network diagrams, database schemas, system architecture documentation — that IT4998 will implement against, along with a project timeline identifying key milestones and risks. Students practice justifying technical design decisions, connecting each choice back to the project's actual requirements.
Key topics in IT4997
- IT capstone project selection and appropriate scoping for a single term
- Functional and non-functional requirements definition
- Technical design deliverables: network diagrams, database schemas, architecture documentation
- Project timeline planning: milestones and risk identification
- Justifying technology and design choices against project requirements
- Preparing a complete capstone proposal for instructor/committee review
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Worked example: scoping an appropriately ambitious IT capstone project
- Overambitious scope: "Build a complete enterprise network with full redundancy, a custom application, and a comprehensive security operations center" — unrealistic for one term
- Appropriately scoped: "Design and implement a small-business network infrastructure with segmented VLANs, a basic inventory management database application, and documented security controls appropriate to the business's size"
- Why it works: Demonstrates competency across networking, database design, and security within a realistic, well-bounded implementation timeline
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Frequently asked questions
In professional IT project work, inadequate upfront planning is one of the most common causes of project failure or significant rework — requirements discovered mid-implementation, architecture decisions made under time pressure without proper analysis, and scope that expands uncontrollably without a documented boundary all lead to costly problems that proper planning prevents. IT4997 dedicates a full course to this planning work specifically to instill this discipline before students enter professional environments where skipping proper requirements and design work carries real cost, and it also gives instructors a clear, documented baseline (the approved requirements and design) against which to evaluate whether IT4998's final implementation actually achieved what was originally proposed, rather than having no reference point to assess whether the finished capstone met its stated goals.
The right scope balances demonstrating genuine breadth across the IT domains the student has studied against maintaining enough depth and coherence that the project remains a focused, well-integrated system rather than several disconnected mini-projects loosely bundled together. IT4997 teaches students to select a capstone project where the different technical domains genuinely need each other to solve one coherent problem — a small-business network project, for instance, naturally requires networking design, a database for some business function, and security controls protecting both, meaning the different domains are integrated by the nature of the problem itself, rather than artificially combined domains that don't actually relate to a single coherent system. A useful diagnostic is whether removing any one domain from the project would break the coherence of the whole — if so, the scope demonstrates genuine, integrated technical competency; if each domain could be removed without affecting the others, the project may be better understood as several separate projects rather than one integrated capstone.