I was working on a project regarding a bionic arm and the project manager in our group had assigned everyone equal days for their concerned work in my undergrad first year and every step was dependent for the previous one to complete his work . The person concerned with the hardware took more than the stipulated time as a result of which the person suppose to monitor the results had less time to analyze it since he had to re-investigate the entire model from scratch because the design was wrong as a result of which we had a delay in submitting the final report if the designer of circuit board had verified after completion the hardware person would not have to redo it.
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?
In one of the first projects I worked on, I had to update a design for a product and change some dimensions on the part. Since it was early in my career, I used a template timeline that my team uses for standard changes. However, I didn't consider if Regulatory Affairs would require any notification to the FDA since I was changing the dimensions of the part, so when I informed them of the change, additional deliverables were required that I hadn't incorporated into my timeline. Unfortunately, the update was late, but I learned from this mistake and every change I've made since then, I was sure to inform Regulatory Affairs (along with all other cross-functional team members) of the full scope of changes and gage what deliverables they believed would be required. Once I have that information and the lead time to complete all changes, I'm able to create a more accurate project timeline. This information is critical in the planning phase of the project.
An obstacle that I've encountered while working on a project involved the the lack of proper communication between the engineering team, project managers, and supervisors. The engineering team had set up a clear, organized, gantt chart of how the objectives of the project would play out. We had presented this project layout to our supervisor whom then would explain the project outline to the project manager who would be giving us our funding for the project. As the project went on, we had to tell our supervisor that some small deadlines would not be met due to the fact that we hit a dead end or it would exhaust an unnecessary amount of funding. This information was not communicated to the project manager who then thought that the project was going completely fine. Ultimately, the project task did not meet its final deadline and the project manager was very surprised and disappointed as to how the project task took a bad turn. I believe what we could have worked on was the planning and execution phases of our project. We could have had the project manager attend each weekly meeting instead of once a month. After realizing communication was a major issue, we had made a google document of all weekly tasks that were or were not completed. We also agreed with the project manager and supervisor to have a weekly update on the project and its sub-tasks.
I am currently managing a group of students back home and working on a project to create medical devices to help people with CMT to exercise. It is currently at an early stage. I have a non-engineering partner who has numerous experience in running start-ups. One thing we discussed and have lots of problems were to actually find engineers or other members to participate in the project. To be more specific it was hard to scout or find people with the same interests and same mindsets. To add to that my partner told me that regardless of how talented the individuals are the human interaction and management is one of the hardest things to work out since people have such a diverse background and that they are all humans. I would like to know if others who have more experience in the industry and advice in terms of solving the problems I mentioned in this post.
Obstacle that I faced while working on a project was meeting with my team members as I lived a hour ago from where they lived. At the being of the project we decided to face time me in the meeting, however, it was bad experience so I we decided to meet in the middle but after couple of meetings we ended up meeting during our class time every week, which slowed down our progress with the project. So, after couple of weeks we decided it would be best to meet at someones house out side of class hours so we could catch up on the work. In the end we were able to catch up and present working prototype of our project.
We should have worked more on our planning phase so we wouldn't have to rush our project.
While working on my Capstone Design Project with a team of six, it was very difficult to find time outside of class for everyone to meet. The focus of our project was to prototype a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (f-NIRS) cap that is both comfortable and adjustable for patients to wear while participating in research for the M.I.N.D Lab at Syracuse University. As this was for a class, there were multiple checkpoints of our progress throughout the semester. The first of these assessments included a design presentation and review of our prototype plan. This was a large group so naturally there were a few different good ideas suggested in the beginning, but after the team deliberated we decided on one design to move forward with. This design accounted for all of the parameters and characteristics the team agreed upon to be the most important, such as comfort or the mechanisms and range of adjustability. The only downside, which happened to be realized later on in the project, was access to the proper materials and tools to actually build our prototype. This forced us to revert to square one with only a few weeks left until the deadline. Luckily some of the previous ideas were further flushed out and easily feasible in terms of material within the given time frame; although, more research should have been done from the start in the design review to ensure our prototyping materials could be obtained. Encountering a challenge such as this made me realize the importance of ensuring a feasible plan prior to the execution.
In every project, there is always going to be so much that could go wrong. From the initial planning phase, to actually executing the project tasks, minor setbacks can have major consequences. Within industry for example, if a certain machine is required for fabrication and the machine is not working, this would delay the entire task until the machine is fixed. Personally, I can relate this topic back to my senior capstone design project like others in the forum have. In my case, my group tried to be as well organized as possible and was meticulous with scheduling. We had created our own Gantt chart which we updated frequently and made sure to hold every team member accountable. We faced many issues such as not receiving certain parts in time or having to test out different sensors unexpectedly. Although these issues delayed specific tasks within the overall project, they did not impact the critical path within our Gantt chart. Perhaps the biggest issue we faced was with coding a phone application we were creating. Although we had allotted plenty of time for this, creating the phone application proved to need more time than expected. This task ultimately impacted the critical path and had delayed the completion of our project by an entire month. Thankfully, due to proper planning, we had allotted for 2 months of slack between when we planned to be completed and when we actually needed to be completed by. Obstacles with varying severity will always occur during projects. However, with the proper planning and anticipation, the obstacles could be managed and accounted for.
During my senior design project, which involved building a low-cost scanning acoustic microscope, one obstacle we encountered was the fact that no one had experience in LabView programming. This was a major hurdle for the team, since the professor (the client) wanted the motors to work through LabView programming. If we did not learn how to use LabView immediately, then we would not have reached the deadline to show our scanning acoustic microscope working and functioning properly. This issue could not have been prevented entirely, but we could have done better planning, in going through LabView tutorials and learning the software skills. Nonetheless, we overcame this obstacle by asking the professor countless questions about LabView, which he was very proficient in. The team eventually learned how to use LabView, given our previous programming language experience, albeit in a different language. It was crucial for us to reach out and ask a lot of questions, in addition to going through tutorials online, which really kept us on track. Another important note is to keep in touch with the client often, since their ideas may change or they may want to know updates on the project. By constantly bothering our professor on the LabView code we had so far, it was easier for the professor to gauge how far along in the project we were and we were able to obtain immediate feedback on our project. This is very important, since it's a big mistake to design a project which the client has no interest in. Therefore, I would emphasize that the planning phase of project development is critical, but also continuously updating and obtaining feedback from the client if possible, to ensure that no time is wasted.
I was working as a service advisor at Ford and Lincoln motors company in a middle eastern country. The main issue that forced us to contingency plans was lack of resource such as spare parts, and technicians. So, it may be considered at executing phase, or it can be looked as an unfortunate estimate during planning phase.
My team, which was five technicians, a supervisor technician, and me (a mechanical engineer), rearranged the work priority for lack technicians problem. For lack of supplies problems, we ordered spare parts from other supplier.
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?
While working on my master's thesis last year I encountered an issue with my results. After doing all the preprocessing, post-processing, and analysis of my data I got results that weren't matching with my hypothesis. More than that it was not matching with any of the published papers. So there are 2 options if something like this happens. First either you are a genius and found something no one did or you screwed up. For me, it was the second option. A small parameter in the preprocessing step (first step of executing the process in neuroimaging research) I did something wrong. Because I didn't do any controlling or in other words quality check I missed my deadline and couldn't graduate in spring. Unfortunately, the only way to overcome this issue is to redo all your executing process and make sure you do your controlling or quality check correctly this time.
one example I example of an obstacle I encountered would be during a clinical study of a certain vaccine I was working on as part of a clinical testing team. While we had a tight timeline to complete a certain phase of the study, the entire company staff were pulled out of their responsibilities to work on the COVID vaccine. However, the company directors were not open about moving our timeline or modifying it because it could impact our department negatively for the next 2 years. A solution my team created was to set up alternative shifts so some of us could work on the covid vaccine while the rest carry on their normal duties.
I was recently working on a recall remediation project that had a deadline approaching within 1 month. My team and I were responsible for swapping a recalled component with a revised component on over 1000 units. We were initially confident that we would complete this project on time however we ran into unforeseen issues when our inventory of the replacement part became low. The parts on order were delayed due to COVID-19 shutdowns and there was nothing we could do to expedite the shipping. Fortunately, the parts arrived one week before the deadline and we worked overtime in order to complete the project on time. We could have avoided this obstacle by spending more time in the planning phase of this project. Rather than planning to purchase the parts in two separate orders, we could have planned to purchase the parts in one purchase order which would have avoided the delayed purchase.
I feel one of the obstacles when embarking on a new project is making sure everyone has proper documents and SOP's which has to be followed. When I was working as a QA Intern, there was a process improvement project in which all the departments had to input their opinion and feedback. Unfortunately one of the team was given an outdated SOP by mistake. Although it was rectified soon it led to the delay of project initiation by a few days. These are the mistakes which should be avoided.
I've had a lot of issues with projects, and a lot of them are due to complications that we didn't anticipate or that were impossible to anticipate. One of my projects involves the use of stress analysis software to investigate the impact of pipe shape on the fluid flow through it. We were modeling the trachea in this example, and we intended to utilize CT scans to generate models for the structure, but it didn't work out since the scans were too grainy to create an accurate and high-definition model. As a result, we had to employ a variety of imaging techniques and ask the subjects to return. Because there had been no previous work on the subject that we were working on, I believe this was one of the uncontrollable issues. However, far better and more comprehensive project planning might have been done to have a back-up plan in case of an incident.
I would say just recently.. working on a group project I was placed with people who had different ideas. Some wanted the presentation one way , while others disagreed and wanted it another way. So the time we wasted arguing instead of trying to find a middle ground caused us to lose time. The step we should have focused on more was the initiation phase/implementation . We should have included everybody’s ideas and figured out to incorporate them even if it was just a little. We stayed on topic the rest of the time to make sure we met the deadline. It seems that one persons ideas got used more which was unfair. We fixed the problem by letting the people who felt left out explain the presentation and add their own ideas while speaking. Group projects personally are very scary to me because it is a lot of ideas and you want to make sure everybody is being heard equally.
