When I was working on my capstone project in undergrad we made a lot of assumptions about how easy it would be to program our device. The aim of the device was to open and close a hand, and we had gotten the mechanics down near perfectly. The issue was that no one in my group had a ton of experience in programming or in electronics and we all assumed that, over the course of the project, we would just figure out the specifics required for this part. We did eventually get the device to, "work", but it delayed the project extremely, caused a ton of unnecessary stress, and resulted in a control system that was lackluster and difficult to use.
We ended up falling extremely behind schedule because of our inability to come up with a specific design for the control system, and it was this lack of scheduling and planning that resulted in a device that "functioned" but not nearly as well as we would have liked.
I think, had we really sat down and looked at the details of this part in-depth, we would have been able to come up with a better solution. Or, maybe we should have outsourced and gotten help with this part of the project since none of us had the experience to actually know what we were getting ourselves into.
During my Capstone project, we had unexpected delays in acquiring materials. Our main component was an impact absorbing material we were receiving from a vendor. This was expected to be a fairly simple task, due to previous work with the vendor, so it was not initially expected to be a part of the critical path. However, due to incontrollable delays from the vendor, how soon we could receive the material ended up determining when we could continue with mechanical testing and fabrication of the prototype. We had not taken into consideration external factors, such as acquiring materials from vendors, that could cause delays. This made a seemingly easy and quick task a cause of delays and a critical point in order to continue with the project.
My class. So, I teach honors chemistry which is required for graduating with an advanced diploma. The issue is some of the students get in the class and decide that it's too hard AFTER the two week period when they can drop the course. They usually decide that my class is stupid, they'll never need to use it, and they disregard the fact that we have an SOL. SOL stands for Standard of Learning; it is the state standardized test for any classes that are mandated to take it at the end of the year. Now if the students have enough science credits they can be excused from the SOL and only have to take the final. Many of the students that decide my class is not needed end up having to take the SOL in which my class goes from just another hurdle to get through with minimal effort to something super important to graduation.
