During my time at Rutgers, I was in a group for my senior design project and we had come up with a rough schedule for when to meet, how to go about the design we were given, what each person would be doing, and the costs of the parts. What we didn’t account for was the vacation days and our respective exam dates that would come in the way of our schedule. We were able to redesign the project that was given to us and use the parts that were already given but we also ran into a problem where we needed new parts which would set back our schedule as well. The first semester working on this project was more difficult because of the schedule that was not properly made but during the second semester, we made a stricter schedule with weekly meetings and accounted for our exam schedules and vacation days. We had finally got our parts and used our improved design to have a functioning project at the end of the year.

Not accounting for how long parts take to come in and not keeping a better schedule with important dates could have resulted in not reaching our deadline but by fixing our mistakes the semester after, we were able to create a better Gantt and account for everything to meet every deadline. My group should have focused more on the planning phase and created a Gantt chart from the beginning to account for any setbacks that could have occurred. If we spent more time during the planning phase, all the other phases would have went more smoothly. We made sure to have a stricter schedule with weekly meetings and communicated with each other when we were having a difficulties with our respective parts of the project. This helped to keep our project on track to present at the end of the second semester.