While working on a project, we hit a roadblock during the verification phase. Before this obstacle, we have already spent most of our time and budget on the project. Before submitting 510k for our product, we had to complete a strength testing of our material. The material and the product design failed to pass the specification and thus we had to add more time and increase budget for the project.
We should have spent more time on the planning and research phase to overcome this obstacle. We should have done more analysis of the material and the product design during this phases.
While working at General Dynamics Electric Boat, I was given a project to develop a new technology for submarines. While testing in the Monitoring and Controlling phase of the project, we realized that the device didn't meet certain standards. We had to redesign the device, make another prototype, and get it installed in a particular submarine before it left for sea trials. To overcome this obstacle, we had to hold weekly meetings until everything was done. We had to make action item lists and hold people accountable. These were the main things that kept the project on track. Looking back, we should have focused more on the initiating phase and talked to more people to prevent the problem.
An obstacle that I encountered during the project is the during the executing phase. I worked on the synthesis and purify the N-L-alanyl-L-glutamine. The timeline was perfect, but when purifying the product, I met some problems. The method that we decided can't work well on that. It took us several weeks to try which method is better for purify the N-L-alanyl-L-glutamine. In this case, the planning phase seems much more important.
During the planning phase, we should know more about the product that we will face with. Know more properties in order to deal with the problem. What's more, reserve time for the obstacle is necessary.
In order to deal with the time delayed, we applied for more members to help us, and do several experiments at the same time the catch up our timeline.
The only project experience I have was when working on my senior capstone project last year. One of the main obstacles that the team had to overcome was the procurement phase of our project. We gave ourselves 30 days for the procurement phase of the project, basically all of winter break. Our project was mainly chemistry based and required several different chemicals from a handful of different companies. The first issue we ran into was that no one on the team had the qualifications needed to get approval to order the needed chemicals. Our team advisor was gone most of winter break, and unable to get us the chemicals. We had to wait until winter break was over to order what we needed, but instead of just seating around and waiting for the chemicals to arrive our team took action and began to complete the assembly, final report, and any other part of the project that did not need the chemicals in order to make up for lost time.
In the future, I know that I/the team should focus more time on the planning process of the project life cycle. During the planning process, our team just focused on the overall cycle of our project and we didn’t go into much detail of what each part of the project cycle would need until we hit each part on the way. If we would have researched the companies that were selling the chemicals in the beginning we would have easily figured out that we would need someone with a lab and specific certification to buy the chemicals and would have ordered the chemicals before winter break when our advisor was around.
One obstacle that occurred during a recent project was when several issues were found after the testing phase of the project was completed. This issues were things that should have been identified before the conclusion of the testing phase. Because of this obstacle we had to go back and address the issues and re-test those issues again before moving forward with the project. This caused a little bit of concern and frustration among my team members, but was not a huge issue because we did have enough time to get back on schedule after addressing this issue, so we didn't fall too much off schedule. I think the planning of the schedule was not a problem as we did have some time to deal with this obstacle, but more extensive testing would have prevented this issue from arising. More test cases, more time for testing, and more test runs could have detected some of this issues before testing was complete.
During my undergraduate capstone project, we created a Gantt chart using Microsoft Project to guide us and better visualize the timeline of the project. In the Gantt chart, we divided the project into three parts, brain storming, designing, and testing and allocated specific time for each part. During mid-semester, we realized that we missed several milestones and need to catch up to meet the project deadline. As a result, we looked at the chart again to see the effective way to catch up. We came up with the strategy 1) working extra hours outside of classroom 2) working independent of each other to achieve the goal. We didn’t have a contingency plan as it was an unexpected issue, but we just had to speed things up to finish the project on time.
During my Undergraduate I was working on a project that involves Sleep EEG. We were concentrating too much on the collection of data and data analysis of the EEG using Matlab. We weren't aware about the statistical analysis part. The project period was planned for a semester, in which the data collection and data analysis part took most of the time. Although we got an inference with respect to the collected data, the age balance between the groups was not achieved. This came into our view only after we started the statistical analysis. In order to balance the age related issues, we had to collect extra data and also it consumed lot of time and money. If the statistical analysis part was known before we would have planned accordingly. This made us to work all nights at the end of the semester.
When I first started at Sloan, I created a system with an outside group called eMTA. eMTA is an electronic document management system for our Material Transfer Agreements (eMTAs). Like akshayakirithy's project, eMTA consumed a lot of time and money. The main challenge we faced was in the Testing phase. We believed the series of questions that determined the subsequent branching of questions was simple and user friendly. However in Testing admins without science backgrounds or experience as an admin were having difficulty answering these required questions. We could have avoided this hurtle by conducting testing of the actual questions apart from the system and included a larger group of new admins for testing. Overall, we were still in the testing phase so we were able to make changes to the questions using user feedback, but it would have been easier if we addressed it earlier on to avoid additional time and costs.
During my undergrad, I was tasked with leading a committee for a student government organization. Our task was to promote our organization's initiatives through social media and other advertising, but we ran into a variety of issues due to regulations imposed by the university. Our college had strict guidelines for posting on behalf of a University-funded organization, and every post had to be reviewed by the strategic-communications department. This regulation, coupled with a lack of clear guidelines, made timely advertising very difficult. We would have greatly benefitted from a clear list and solid understanding of the rules.
I have been working as Bioanalytical scientist and my biggest obstacle is things expiring and wasting my time on preparing solutions or reagents for samples I am suppose to extract. So far in my career I have learned to check solutions expiring dates every day before I leave work so I know what is expiring and what i need to make before my samples arrive. Because usually in CROs sample turnover are huge and quick. Big pharmas usually want their data next day so if things are not ready that waste so much time unnecessarily.
While working in a team, it is usually expected that every person in the team contributes equally efficiently to all the tasks assigned to the team. This way of project management would be ideal when all the members of the team are skilled in all the tasks assigned to them. While I was working on a clinical trial study with a few new recruits, the one challenge that we used to face is handling critical data/images. Before starting to work on a study, every employee who would be working on the trial would be trained on the study protocol and imaging requirements that need to be followed for every patient throughout the duration of the study. In some cases, we would receive imaging files that are non-compliant. New recruits as per the protocol, would automatically follow the Good Clinical Practice (GCP) of erasing any images that are out of the requirements of the study protocol. In actuality, those images would be sent by the principal investigator from the particular site, indicating an exceptional response to the drug by a particular patient. These images would be important for the efficacy prediction of the drug and form an important basis for analysis.
In order to resolve this issue, we would either re-assign the tasks to the new recruits for a certain period of time that does not involve handling critical information/data or re-train them on how to handle exceptional cases wisely in cases of non-compliance and non-adherence to the study's imaging protocol.
Working in the industry, not meeting project deadline happens all the time. As a product engineer in a reliability engineering department, obstacle faced was design failed to work and new design team was formed to redo project. Mechanical part of the failed, budget increased tremendously and led to project manager replacement.
With more focus on the planning phase could have prevent the design failure and replacement of the design team to create new design help put the project back on track.
The obstacle I met when I was working on a project was the discrepancy between the members. It is very usual that one group of members have more than one opinion on the same things. And everyone think their opinions are right. Nobody would say" Mine is wrong". So then they will discuss, but sometimes the discussion does not go well. Some people still won't change so finally they decide to quit. I feel whether their opinions are right or wrong, loss of members is not good for a team and project.
Give an example of a time when you encountered an obstacle while working on a project that could have resulted in not reaching the deadline.
What phase of the project life cycle should you have focused on more to have prevented this issue?
How did you overcome this obstacle and what did you do to keep your project on track?
During my Undergrad at Rutgers I ran into a problem when dealing with my senior design project. The specificity and sensitivity percentages we were receiving from our ultrasound scans in our validation and verification phase was not reaching usable numbers and the project had stopped because we could not advance to the next phase. In addition, the ultrasound device we were using were outdated and were not working or providing us with the results we desired. For this we should have focused on the Planning phase more. We should have looked to make sure all of our equipment is up to date and will provide us with the results we wanted. We also should have spent more time on the risk analysis phase to see what we should have done if we ran into a problem like this. We overcame the obstacle by working on other side tasks and ordering new equipment so that we can get the results we wanted from our scans and then proceed to the next step.
I think Planning and execution is one of the most important task to achieve the goal of the project. If the things are planned properly it can be executed in a right direction. I had a project in in my undergrad where we were in the group of three and duration was three months, there was lack of planning about how to proceed with the project. There was lack of communication and planning so there was less time to design the device which I was planning to design as we were approaching the deadline of the project. So I think planning and coordinating with the team members is one of the most important factor to complete the project successfully.
