During my last two years of studies, where I was preparing for the Systems Administrator and Networking Engineer diploma while working at Amazon, at school we had a project in a group of three that went on during the two years.
The project was an imaginary company that had an obsolete network, and we were contracted by them to refresh everything, including computers, servers, networking, cabling, everything. We were a service providing society.

We had a total of four deliverables to do. The first one was the functional and technical specifications, in which we had to mainly describe what the need was. We also had to describe who would be the operators, and do a full functional analysis to make sure our solution was adapted to the client's needs.

The second one was the engineering deliverable. In this one, we had to know which servers we would put, which networking equipment, laptops, desktops, which operating system they would have, we had to manage the Wi-Fi, how the whole network would be cabled and configured (VLANs, fiber or not, STP...), who we would subcontract and for which tasks, and, of course, how much everything would cost. We also had to plan the learning process of the new softwares and systems we would install for the administrators and users.

The third one was more management-oriented. Now that we would have all the technical specifications, we had to think about the deployment strategy, and how we could assure a smooth transition between the current infrastructure and ours. We had to make a whole deployment and learning planning. Another major aspect we had to develop in this deliverable was the DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) and BCP (Business Continuity Planning). We also had to write the terms of service and general selling conditions.

The last deliverable was a summary of the three ones described above.

For each one, we would make a presentation to a board of examiners, and the grade would count for the final exam, and it was also the case for the reports. This project was very interesting because it helped us learn a lot on how things work when being contracted by a company to work on their infrastructure.