An obstacle that I've encountered when working on a project would be unexpected delays and time management when it comes to working with a team. A saying I always keep in mind when working on projects is Murphy's Law, "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." in actuality this saying is very practical in the sense that one must always be prepared for the unexpected and also create a contingency plan. In my experience I have had equipment needed to further progress with the project but due to delays it the team was almost unable to meet our deliverables. However, because we created a Gantt chart to keep our progress on track and the overall timeline of our project we were able to implement a backup plan.

An obstacle I encountered while working on a project was not doing certain tasks correctly, and having to redo them. This ended up causing delays in completing the project because certain tasks had to get done before you can do the following tasks. Before the task was repeated a second time, the mistakes were evaluated so that it doesn't happen again. Once it was figured out where things went wrong and what can be done instead, then the task was repeated, and luckily it was successful the second time around. I think that if we took more time in planning, then those tasks wouldn't have gotten messed up. Instead, we just assigned tasks to be done, instead of figuring out ahead of time how the tasks should be done.

I was doing my final design project in my FED class in NJIT, and it was a huge project that required a lot of work. To make story short, I had to design a gear a certain way in order to have the right mechanism later on, and I missed a small feature in the gear. In results of that, after three full days of designing the rest of the project I discovered that I had to fix that part before doing any mechanism. If I had a good initiating phase to know that every little feature is dependent on the old ones, I would have focused on each single feature instead of saying that I can change anything later on. At the end, I had to erase all what I did after that mistake and re do it again, which required double the work to meet the deadline.

I had taken up a project during my final year of BE where in I created a member of four like minded people to work Functional Electric Muscle Stimulator. We had in total of one year to complete the project and had to to submit status report apart six months. While doing this project in order to prove its contribution and effectiveness in current market we had done a research and various expert survey but in proving the worthiness of our idea we spent so much time that when it came towards the end to complete the device we were short of time. I think if we had done proper planning and allocated certain amount of time to all task according to priority and allocated those task with specific time to certain person we could have done better. We would have been able to add some more features to your device which we planned to but were not able to add due short time. So I think even though we were successful with your device and won a lot of appreciation for it but if we would have done better planning we could have been able to come up with even better product.

I was working on a software enhancement project which consisted of a large team of 15 people. Since the team was so big and mostly comprised of fresh graduates, communication became a huge problem. Due to this, the team did not meet the mid-way deadlines for the go-live of a component within the software. After the mishap, the project leader introduced Microsoft TFS to the team which allowed us to input daily activities and keep track of the SLA's, etc. It also allowed to keep track of each member's performance within the team. This tool is very powerful as it has many other functionalities which made communication within the team extremely smooth.

A proper communication plan was not laid out during the planning phase. If TFS was introduced right in the beginning, the mishap would probably would not have occurred. In conclusion, planning phase is very crucial as it gives sort of a map for the team to follow.

I am currently working on a project that I inherited from a former coworker about a month ago. Very high level, it is a software driven update to some manufacturing equipment. It seems like the people who controlled this project before me did not consider potential impact to process validation and all of the processes that interface with the equipment that will change. The subsequent activities to address all verified and validated processes basically blew our timeline out of the water.
To address this obstacle, first, I escalated the issue to management and asked for additional resources to help me even come close to my original deadline. I also pulled in a cross functional team of engineering, quality, and process validation to strategize how to approach the validation activities. Then I outlined all changes that needed to happen to support the project and distributed the task between all of the resources.
I think the original planning phase of this project should have been more developed. There should have been early on conversations between the software team, engineering and the validation team to strategize the best way to approach these production updates.

In my freshman year of college, I had to participate in an engineering design project, where I would work with a team to create and code a robot to perform medically related tasks. One of the obstacles faced while working on the project was the inability of the robot to run the code properly. The motor of the robot was old and this prevented it from going in a straight line. This was an obstacle that my team faced. However, instead of inputting a correction code that would fix this problem we decided to change our code to try and accommodate for the erratic behavior of the robot. To prevent this issue, I wish we had looked at the planning process more in depth. We could have incorporated the correction code at an early stage, before it was too late. However, we eventually were able to get a new motor that helped resolve the problem. This led us to be on track and complete the project.

I've had a lot of problems within projects and a lot of them are due to either problems that we failed to foresee or problems that were impossible to foresee. One project of mine included the use of a stress analysis software to analyze the effects of the pipe geometry with the flow of the fluid that passes through it. In this case, we were modeling the trachea and we wanted to use CT scans to create models for the structure but it ended up not working because the quality of the scans were not too grainy to create an accurate and high-definition model. Because of this, we had to use different imaging techniques and ask the participants to come back in. The imaging took a couple to perform and some processing to get the results. This was one of the reasons why we took a while to work on the project.

I think that this was one of the uncontrolled problems because there has not been any previous work on the project that we were working on. However, planning of the project much better and much more detailed could've been done to have a back up plan with regards to the issue.

There were multiple times where a problem had caused me to have detrimental effects on a project. Most of the time, the problem arises from poor planning, which is a crucial step in the project life cycle. A capstone project which was assigned to a group of four seemed to be the most hard hitting project. It required a year's worth of research and planning. In the beginning, it was hard to follow-up with three other members, and sometimes, no progress would get done, since some members either did the same work or did not do the work at all. However, after communicating the issues with each other, we realized we needed to set "mini deadlines" for aspects of the project we wanted to be done. Our professor recommended using a Gantt chart, which did help a lot. We also updated work on a google docs, where everyone could see the progress that was being done, instead of being unsure and repeating work. Thus, the issue was mainly in planning, and our focus should have been entirely on that. We were able to finish the capstone by the end of the year, and it was very gratifying.

I worked on a project that was so volatile during the execution phase that it really did not follow any plan, and eventually it was cancelled. It really was a complete failure. One of the main contributing factors was that the planning phase was pretty much overlooked. It was an acquisition, not an NPD project, therefore it was not treated the same from a project management standpoint. However, it should have gone through the same regimented planning phase as any project should so that the execution would go smoothly. In addition, the project went through several project managers, and the transition from one project manager to the next never went smoothly. I'm wondering if anyone else has worked on a project where the project manager was replaced by someone else. How was the transition? Did it cause project delays?

One example of an obstacle I encountered during the excitation of a project in my undergraduate pharmaceutical research laboratory would be that the inventory of essential chemicals was not up to date with the computer log. Often times, while preforming multistep organic synthesis, a critical solvent or solute would be missing or even the container empty with nobody bothering to order more. This would cause time delays in the production of the final pharmaceutical compound in relation to its expected completion date due to the need to stop manufacture and order from an outside vendor the missing component and wait for delivery. The delay became an issue that could have easily been prevented if a more careful inventory of starting materials had been done prior to starting the chain of reactions. Lucky, the lead professor had built in enough slack time into the project schedule that the delay of some compounds did not through off the entire study.

I used to work in a busy clinical research lab. We would normally have 10 on-going large and overlapping projects. Each person simultaneously contributes to every single project. Therefore, there is a lot of room for error. Because it's a clinical research lab, the amount of paperwork for each subject is huge, documents could go up to 3-5 inches thick to read/fill out. One of our big issues is keeping all forms up-to-date and signed correctly. We had a halt from all data collecting/analyzing activities from the IRB once because two subject's consent forms were not up-to-date even though the content of the protocol was not different. So, unfortunately, our progress was stalled, we established a double, triple checking system so that this issue would never come up again. It is crucial to have a good and thorough checking system so that everything could function smoothly in the long run.

I worked on a project to validate some of our labs that were doing GxP work with non-GxP work. The idea was to make all the work GxP and have it follow GxP procedures. One of the biggest problem that we ran into was the requirements by Quality. We had to satisfy some requirements for the Change control that we had open to go into effect and validate that labs as GxP labs. One of the things that delays our plan was the plan to consolidate the logbooks. The execution phase is where we ran into problems, every time we satisfied the requirements for QC and QA, they would find new ones. Because of the constant changes and re-planning, we were delayed by almost a month. However it was a leaning experience and would help to shape my instincts when dealing with quality.

Currently I am leading two CAPA investigations where we have to reconfigure data acquisition system which is set for revalidation in March. One of the biggest issues that we ran into was reaching adequate information/communication with the company headquarters over in Germany. Now, this was a huge struggle for us. Juggling a language barrier along with the vacation time that is common in the other side of the world were just some of the issues that hindered our progress. We also developed a new set of user needs to improve the system which had to go through headquarters. When we received word from Germany with updates of the changes, what they had given us was no where near of what we asked. We had to request an extension in order to negotiate and get what was required for the end users (Inspectors). The phase of the life cycle that I should have focused was on the planning phase of the individual phase. I should have accounted for the communication difference/vacation time. I overcame this obstacle by remaining patient but continually sending them emails and escalating the situation to the directors which helped me get the action items due on time.