Project Management: Preliminary Project Review -(Group 10) (Group 10)

Back to Gate 2 Home Page - Gate 2 - Product Dissection (Group 10)

Introduction

Here we provide an assessment of our work and management plans. We explain what steps of the dissection process went well and what didn't go as planned. Also we talk about unresolved challenges and how our group is planning to address these problems in future gates and group work.

Cause for Corrective Action

The group as a whole has run very efficiently over the stage of Gate 2. The group’s documentation plan ended up being successful and went well through the dissection process as well as through cataloging each part and describing the processes we went through. Our process for doing these tasks were different from our gate 1 proposal because we documented everything into a composition book. The rules of our documentation process were simple; if you take a part off of the snow blower or do some step of dis-assembly it has to have a picture taken of it and given its own part/step number, and a description of how it came off, and where it came off. Then the next part would be given the next number in sequence. The Facebook page proved to be a good idea because it made it possible for the group to have last minute meetings when we needed to start dissection before we had planned for one in class. We are, however, not perfect.

• The main issue that we had was with our initial proposal was the time we had set aside to dissect the snow blower. The documentation process took a lot longer than we expected and as a result we spent nearly double our projected three meetings for three hours a piece which we estimated in gate one. To overcome this we simply put more hours into the dissection process's so we could properly record the steps.

• Another challenge which we had to overcome was how to distinguish what a particular part of the snow blower was made of, in particular distinguishing the difference between aluminum and steel parts. To overcome this our group adopted a small refrigerator magnetic bear, which we used to determine if the part was magnetic, if it was then the part was most likely steel and if not it was most likely aluminum for the purposes of the materials which where contained in the snow blower.

To overcome and avoid future challenges we plan to continue to utilize the Facebook page, and to increase the speed of communication response time we are each going to link the page notifications to our phones. Also to avoid future problems we made sure to spend a lot of time writing a detailed dissection process record, which we anticipate will help our future gates making it easier for us to find and answer questions about any particular part or step of the dissection process.