About 6 years ago the company I work for was developing a next gen drug coated coronarystent. Due to competition, sales were falling from the companies first drug coated stent. The first stent used to be a major money maker for the company as it was the first of its kind to the market. The project to develop the next gen stent had many issues mostly centered around the design of the stent itself and stent retention issues onto the balloon. Due to these issues the project missed the completed DV milestone. To overcome this a special team of top engineers was created to solve this problem. Despite several tries and resource loading the project, the team was not able to come up with a solution for the stent retention and it failed completely. This led to the project being cancelled and the company cancelling the entire drug coated stent program along with layoffs of hundreds of employees. This is not an example of overcoming a missed milestone as much as an example of how project issues can escalate and affect many in a company.
When working on my senior design project during my undergrad there were several times where we missed a milestone. The way we approached this was to continue working on the milestone as we progressed with other tasks on our schedule. We were fortunate that we were able to do this because we had enough time built into our schedule that we were able to simultaneously work on missed milestones while working on other activities and ultimately completing the project in time.
Similar too many other people who responded, I also experienced some setbacks during my capstone project. The project was to design an adhesive that would be applied to a graft intended to block a cerebral spinal fluid leak. Our initial timeline involved having nearly 2 months to test our prototype. Unfortunately the materials we purchased took much longer to arrive than we allotted for. This left us with only about a month left to perform testing before the project was due. The way we coped with this was to get rid of certain tests that we intended to perform on our prototype (ex cell viability). We were able to get away by this by saying that the tests we removed from our protocol were outside the scope of our project. In the real world, however, this would not be acceptable. The problem could've been avoided by better planning our timeline to make our materials were ordered earlier so they would arrive with enough time to do the proper testing.
For my senior capstone project, we are required to follow a schedule we made with Microsoft Project 2016. There have been a few times this semester we've missed milestones because of 3D printing delays or part deliveries. Our project is to construct a chair that one of the professors could use to successfully carry out their research. The two main components of the chair are a restrictive headrest and a footrest. When there was delay in making our footrest, we were able to compensate for the delay by working on both subsystems simultaneously to make sure everything got done in a timely fashion.
Similar to the posts above, I experienced an issue during my capstone project of missing a milestone. My team was developing an ultrasonic transducer for therapuetic use. Some of the components which was going to be used for the transducer was lost during shipment. This set our timeline back quite a bit but instead of waiting for those parts to be shipped back over to us, we decided to shift another milestone up that would not affect the completion of this one. We decided to shift focus into developing the electronic driver to the transducer rather than wait for the transducer parts.
One of the project I worked on at my company, we had to include anchoring brackets with a new server rack that we built up to show to our customer for their opinion and approval. We got a shipment from our vendor for the brackets, however upon inspection we discovered that the clearance slots in the brackets were not long enough and didn’t line up with the mounting holes in the rack. We had to get this new prototype to the customer that week, no excuses. Because of the lead time from our vendor we couldn’t order another batch of brackets in time, so we took the brackets and reworked them using whatever tools we could find to not have this shipment delayed. Not the easiest option but our backs were against the wall to get this prototype shipped that week. We did communicate the issue with the vendor so that the next shipment was made correctly.
One of the manufacturing projects that my team works on at my company, was delayed because of an issue in the biology department. The cell biology department had an incubator that was contaminated that killed all of the cells that were needed to manufacture the diagnostic tests that we make. This pushes us back about a month because of all the cleaning and the re-growing process of the cells. This was time that was only partially able to be made back by overtime spent by the biology and the manufacturing department. Luckily, 2 weeks of slack time was built in so that we could have a little bit of room for error and the costumer didn't mind too much, or so they say.
For my senior design we had developed an portable ultrasound device for micron position tracking that can be used to diagnose scoliosis in patients. Our Gantt chart had all of the specifics as to when test would be run and what type of results we needed from the testing. A milestone we had missed was running test of a replica spinal column while submerged in water to represent the medium of the human body. We were comparing the results we got for distance between vertebrae's to actual distance measured. To reach our milestone we had to complete our data analysis on bone shadow regions and the specificity and sensitivity of imaging our wrist, so that we can move on to imaging the spine. We also were slow with getting real patients to scan, and so at the end of the semester we had to schedule all of our scans on the same day to complete our Gantt chart. All other aspects of our Gantt chart had been completed on time.
When keeping up with milestones, one of our greatest tool is communication. We made sure we always gave updates on our every part of the project to the project manager to always make predictions on whether or not we would not be able to meet any of our objectives. In my experience we use gantt charts for process improvement, where we would have meeting to around time line, personnel implementation and deviations that have happened and how to change it.
Our capstone team also created a gant chart, and in the beginning it was a lot of guessing on how much time we thought each task would take. We tried to be as accurate as possible by asking the person who would complete the task how much time they thought it would take them. However since the gant chart does not take vacations, spring break, and exam week into consideration, sometimes it was difficult to complete the tasks on time. We did not have any missed milestones due to this, but we had one because of an unexpected error within testing. The 3D piece we used during 3D testing had broke, so we were delayed from completing our testing in time. We had to test very quickly after, and shorten the time span allotted for our next test.
Like many, we had to create a gantt chart for our capstone project. There were many couple of times where we missed a great milestone in our project. Our project consisted of using several different sensors, that will be uploaded data to the web. Our first issues was getting defective parts from Europe. We fell behind schedule, because it took weeks to deliver, and it would take even longer to get back the working ones. We had a contingency plan where we can get other sensors that was able to do the same job. We fell behind for almost two weeks, because once we got the parts we had to code them and make sure it was working, the way we wanted it to work. We divided the work, and each member had additional work. In the end we reached the all deadline and the project was successful.
During one of my courses my team had a project where we worked based off of a gantt chart to try and keep us on track. It was our first time working from a gantt chart and we did find it to be a challenge. We ended up having to rush some parts of the project due to missing milestones for other tasks. The milestones we missed were needed so we had to figure out a way to get them done even though other milestones were coming up. We tried to reassign tasks when we realized some were shorter and longer than others so we could complete more tasks at the same time. Looking back we would have had more realistic deadlines and separated tasks further instead of grouping some of them into one.
At work we were working on a project to develop a new diagnostic test. We hit a road bump about 2 weeks prior to turning over the project to manufacturing. This put the entire project behind by a week. Fortunately, the engineers on the manufacturing and the development team worked overtime for 2 weeks to catch up and allow for the project to still finish on time. There was a lot of overtime that no one really wanted to work but that how it works some times.
While working on our capstone project, my team and I missed our milestone of having our project be completely functional for our first demonstration to our project advisors. Our original plan was to have the system fully functioning and utilize the feedback from our first demonstration to make refinements and final touches in time for our second demonstration. The reason we missed this milestone was that the project required the use of two force sensitive resistor (FSR) sensors as specified in our DSD, but due to setbacks we only had one functional FSR sensor attached to our project. The setback we faced was damaging both the second sensor and an extra while soldering wires to its pins. Nonetheless, we were able to still showcase the intended functionality of our project at our first scheduled demonstration using only one FSR sensor. Despite missing this milestone, we were able to still complete our project due to the slack we incorporated of making the second demonstration our late finish (LF) date. Overall, we were able to acquire additional sensors in time to complete our project, but learned a lesson of accounting for additional resources in the case of setbacks such as this during development. Since the second scheduled demonstration was only two weeks after the first, we were lucky to be able to avoid scenarios such as the sensors being sold out or not arriving in time.
I have had a specific work experience where a my team was assigned to completed an investigation write-up for a CAPA. The day it was due, our boss had reviewed it and decided the investigation did not address the problem and requested a few more hours to re-write it before the meeting where we would present it to upper management. Needless to say, it was not ready in time and my boss had to request for more time for the team to re-investigate the problem. An extension for the project was given to allow more time to redraft the report and have it address the problem. Once the request was given, my boss assigned the investigation to me, where I was given 3 weeks to come up with the draft of the investigation. My boss had re-allocated the tasks I had for that month amongst my other co-workers to give me time to focus on this investigation report. Luckily, I had completed the investigation in time and presented it with acceptance amongst my boss and upper management.
