If this was a real industry project with a team, there would be more face to face interactions. There would be meetings and discussions with different people in the team to discuss how to go about the issue in the project and why it failed. Everyone would spend time researching and thinking about what went wrong and what could solve the issue. A meeting would give everyone a chance to discuss their ideas and see what would work to fix the issue. To verify the findings, whatever idea the group believes will be used to solve the issue and see if that is the solution. The group also has to make sure to stay on task because if there are deadlines in the project, they must be met otherwise it will delay the whole project. I believe that face to face interactions are a lot easier to work with people verses online but online interactions can be done through video calls. Coming to meetings prepared with solutions help with not wasting time and having multiple solutions to choose from for the correct course of action in the project. Face to face interactions help with timing as well because it is easier to adjust schedules and have a quicker meeting to discuss the issue as well as bounce ideas off one other while in the office.

Face to face interactions can become too much at times, keep in mind.  Ever hear of a company, or work in one, that does nothing but have meetings which leaves nobody with enough time left over to actually do the work?  A few companies that I can think of are "broken" like that.  There is a balance that needs to be struck.

As an aside, there is no reason why you all cannot meet in person for your simulation projects.  That is fine if you wish to consent to arranging that with one another.  I do not require it, however, and have designed the simulations to be doable remotely.

I think meeting face to face could allow for the problem to be identified faster. Being able to work together in a face to face setting allows for hands on work, such as being able to look and touch the labels and understand the problem that way. Meeting face to face allows for no miscommunication between the team members. Meeting in person makes it faster to get responses to ideas from all team members. By meeting in person possible solutions can be tested right away instead of having to wait. This saves more time and allows for solutions to be attempted until the proper solution is found. In person meetings allows for the undivided attention from each member unlike working remotely because each member has a different schedule. Even though technology has made it very easy to work remotely I personally would prefer the in person meetings because most importantly there would not be a lack of communication.

Fortunately, my team was very organized and concise with how each member communicated their thoughts. This helped us develop a clear plan of action to resolve the simulation in a timely manner. I believe working remotely was successful for us because everyone had time to read and digest the material individually, allowing enough time for everyone to process and understand the problem at hand. Therefore, each group member had a potential solution to present. I think that face to face interactions can sometimes be counterproductive because it does not allow certain group member’s ideas to fully develop. If these ideas take time to develop, then a face to face meeting may be too fast-paced to discuss all possible ideas and solutions. I would suggest that everyone read the project at hand prior to the face to face meeting and try to bring ideas to the meeting. If this project simulation was my actual job, I think the only issue would be ensuring that everyone fully understands the problem at hand. Working remotely can leave a lot of room for miscommunication but I think we would overcome this issue by communicating in an organized and concise manner.

Although I agree with the posts above that in-person meetings are better for clearer communication and clarification, I would like to suggest that the most efficient way of handling real-world projects is having both in-person and remote or online methods of tackling project tasks. The in-person meetings should be less frequent than the online participation of the group members, since they often require the right scheduling times and certain days may be better or worse for certain team members. By having a greater percentage of teamwork/meetings being done on-line, everyone can work at their own schedules. As a bonus, people have different periods of high productivity and remote-working would allow for each individual's contribution when they feel most productive or comfortable, or when they are simply in "the-zone". Thus, I believe the remote-teamwork time should be greater than the time spent in-person. Lastly, the scale of the project is also important in determining whether more in-person work would be better than remote-work. I believe that if these project simulations were a year-long, it would make sense for the groups to meet in-person every now and then, however, if the simulations were a week-long, remote-meetings/online discussions would work best. 

I also agree that in a real industry project there would be clearer communication within the team because they could meet face-to-face. However I think that since this particular simulation involves laboratory testing, there would be additional restrictions if it was a real-life project. For example in this simulation we were faced with a failed design verification test, and our team had to come up with an alternate test so that the samples would pass. In the simulation we simply presented our ideas to the instructor who then told us if they worked or not, but in reality each new experiment would require additional supplies, space in the laboratory, and time to execute in order to verify that the new proposed experiment works. These factors would all need to be considered by the project manager when planning out the project, and they may need to communicate with other departments and spend more money in order to meet any additional resource requirements. Overall I think the face-to-face interactions would definitely help in brainstorming ideas and sharing what did and what didn’t work, but the team would face challenges due to the limitations of a real-world environment.

The simulations are a great way to learn how to deal with problems during protocol and work with a team to solve these problems. I do agree that in person meetings would be best to figure out how to fix any arising issues because everyone would be present to give any inputs and figure out the plan of action efficiently. However, in person meetings are not possible all the time because vendor representatives/ team members who are involved in the project may not be at the same location all the time. At my company, we work with a lot of outside vendors and suppliers, and we usually have to video chat or call them during an in person meeting with those who can make it in order to consult their opinions. 

Through this week's simulation, we were able to learn how to communicate online and figure out what we can do with the resources at hand. Communication is very important when conducting projects, especially when it's not done in person. 

Face to face meetings are definitely the best method for getting the work defined and delegated, but as Dr. Simon said, they can definitely lead to a situation where the meetings can take up time that would be better spent working towards the solution of the problem. This is where the importance of a strong project manager can come into play. I have often sat in meetings that have been half an hour to an hour of people reiterating what someone else said rather than proposing new ideas or solutions to a problem. If the person in charge of the meeting was able to step in and end the discussion of one topic and move the meeting forward, the time would have been more efficiently used.

In the simulation, I would have found it much easier to interact face to face versus communicating via email. Our simulation ran into some delays due to lack of communication, once a group member set it upon herself to email the group we finally were able to get started ( I didn't start the email since I had a hard time navigating through canvas, but I digress). Once we were able to start communicating it was a bit more troublesome to just out right suggest new protocols without discussing the actual problem first. Now, if the team were to interact face to face, I believe we would have had a much smoother communication and roll assignment. While working for Biotronik, each week we had a meeting to discuss update, new findings, new problems, and new solutions for an hour. Within that hour we are also able to delegate tasks, communicate issues and how to solve them. Although this is only the first simulation, I look forward to improving our methods in the second one with a different way of communicating with each other.

In industry experience, not medical device field, we usually do these meeting in conference room or call the project manger share the problem with a team and we brainstorm a solution every team member do there research about the problem and share there solution with the team either by email conference chat or face to face meeting. These solutions then discussed and we end up with what’s best to be done. For testing and verification quality department help us in this issue but we usually back them with our research. Sometimes we need to put more hours and do overtime if we had deadline.

This week, I was in Group 3 for the first simulation. When deciding how to change the procedure for the verification test, there was two things that I noticed were different compared to face to face. The first thing I noticed that was different was that it was a lot harder to brainstorm as the speed of communication is a lot slower through text messages online. The second thing I noticed was that all the work done was asynchronous where everyone worked on their own and then came with ideas rather than everyone working together at  the same time. If I was working on a real industry project face-to-face in the future, I would expect the faster communication to allow more collaboration.

If this was a project in industry, I believe the initial meeting and planning of how to address the challenges presented would have been very similar. My simulation group had all done research and reviewed the necessary information prior to meeting, so when we met we were immediately able to begin collaborating and brain storming solutions. In industry, this would be the ideal way to run a meeting addressing a failed test or problem of any sort. Verifying the findings would then be more challenging in an actual job. In the simulation, since the proposals were all presented as hypotheticals, it was simply suggesting a solution and finding out if it would work. However, in industry this would be more challenging and require much more time if we had to physical make the changes and perform the testing with the new setup. This would require more time to perform the experiment and then record and review the results. If this was an actual job, my group would not have had problems in submitting work in a timely manner. We were able to draft a new proposal and report both in timely manners. 

If simulation one was given to my group in a real industry setting, I honestly think we would have finished the work at a similar pace or maybe even faster. When we began discussions, we had all already done the necessary prep work of reading documents and thinking of solutions. Once, we finished discussing what we wanted to change we actually waited for the “testing to be completed” (No offense to Dr. Simon he is busy, and we put our forum post in the wrong location). If we were the project team it would have been our responsibility to complete the testing ourselves and create a report. Depending on the availability of testing supplies we could have finished testing in one or two days. This is purely the case for this simulation of course as the test procedure was very simple. Overall though I think because we approached the project as team effort, we were able to complete it timely online and would have been able to do the same in person if necessary.

From my experience working with my group, I believe we were able to not only effectively communicate our ideas, but also get our assignment submitted in a timely manner working remotely. I would have to agree with Dr. Simon’s reply to this post that scheduling face to face meetings with everyone can be challenging and too much at times. Furthermore, in terms of this simulation being implemented in real-life, I would agree that some team members would have to meet in-person to run the verification test, but not all at the same time. Nonetheless, from my limited experience working in industry and academic research, I believe that communication for some aspects of a project can be done just as effectively remotely including the scheduling of locations and times to run the actual tests. In general, I believe that the increased effectiveness in-person meetings add in comparison to remote communication is highly dependent on the complexity and urgency of the topic requiring discussion. Overall, I have found that a balance between holding in-person meetings and remote communication has allowed me to increase my daily productivity. Personally, I have had experiences where the time I spent commuting to attend an in-person meeting was greater than the duration of the actual meeting.

I think that if this was a real industry project and we could have met face-to-face I would have been far more productive. My team mostly communicated through the canvas forum, of which I did not have notifications set up for. I struggled to communicate via this method, although I did encourage my fellow team members to put all our planning on a google document which made it easier for me to keep track of changes.  I do not blame my team members for this, I have ADHD and it is just something that I need to work around and work on.

I know that I thrive under in-person conditions. It’s hard to miss something when someone is speaking directly to your face. It is also a lot easier to communicate since there is no lapse in the time between when a message is sent and when it is received by the user (talking is far more immediate).

In terms of this project specifically, I think that my team would have actually tested the protocol ourselves and would have had more one-on-one time to throw ideas around and more effectively communicate. When everything is written down it tends to get more formalized. This isn’t an outright bad thing but it makes it hard to brainstorm informally. I felt like I didn’t really have the opportunity to introduce unfinished concepts to my group, if we were in person then I believe I would have had a better chance of introducing concepts without them being viewed as finalized ideas.

For my solutions specifically, I would have had more of a clear and distinct way of testing them via a knowledge of what we were specifically working with. A lot of this project was theorizing, in reality we would know exactly what we were working with and would thus be able to more specifically plan via those limitations. Our limitations would be the resources we had access to, i.e what materials we had in the lab to test our theories. We would also be more able to break down our project idea and test each theory in different parts as opposed to submitting all our changes at once.