Wesley Reed | Honors Experiences

Starting unofficially in June of 2021, I have been working with a local non-profit called Cinderella’s Closet to build an application to help them track event scheduling and inventory management. Cinderella’s Closet Cincinnati is a nonprofit organization in Cincinnati, Ohio that works with junior and senior high school girls (or princesses) who are unable to attend their high school prom because they need a dress, shoes, and other items. Cinderella’s Closet encourages high school girls to recognize their beauty and value by providing a unique prom shopping experience.

Due to the amount of work this project entails, I formed a team with Ben Romig and Trent McGinnis and we registered the idea as our senior capstone project with the university. The university assigned Dyllon Dekok to be our faculty advisor for the project. This project exceeds the expectations of our senior capstone requirement because we set our own timeline to have the application completed by the beginning of February 2022 so that Cinderella’s Closet could use it for the 2022 prom shopping season.

With much effort and an early start, the team was able to deliver the event scheduling features by the February deadline and then added inventory management in a subsequent release in early March. However, the project is far from over and we are planning to continue maintaining the project and adding new features past graduation.

Throughout the experience, I served as the project manager and our liaison to Cinderella’s Closet. This means I’ve been responsible for keeping the client informed our our progress, receiving and processing bug reports and feature requests, and keeping our task board up to date and in priority order. Early on I made the mistake of putting tasks on the board that were far too broad and it caused tasks to take a very long time and created many blocking tasks. As the project progressed, I learned how to break larger pieces down into more manageable tasks so that they could be completed within the boundary of our two-week sprints.

Click here to view our presentation on the ITEXPO Website

Click here to view our final report published in the UC library (coming soon)

Click here to view the documents written during the experience