What are some reasons that increase the cost of the project, and how to avoid them? There are plenty of reasons that can increase the cost of a project. The main two that come to my mind are vendor pricing…   Read more»

@qbs2  Deciding priorates is a difficult task that may change job to job. We saw in one of the recent simulations how budget and quality can go head to head. Depending on which route you took, you either limited your…   Read more»

Firstly, thank you for making this post, I am really enjoying the responses and learning about personal experiences at companies nearby. I had worked an internship at Weiss-Aug in their surgical products division. They work to produce parts for laparoscopic…   Read more»

It causes a big ethical dilemma when trying to decide between getting a product out on the market to help patients as soon as possible and delaying the release for extra testing. It is best ethically to take the time…   Read more»

The researchers and industry need to start their relationships with very clear expectations of what can and cannot be shared with clear terms to their NDAs. Some projects may allow for researchers to share specific findings or manufacturing methods. As…   Read more»

I fell that keeping steady contact with the manufacturing team during the design process, especially toward the end of the process is very important. The manufacturing team would have much more in depth knowledge on how the product would scale…   Read more»

I would start by reaching out to the vendor and ask them to send replacements as the shipment was not up to their usual standards, hopefully it was just a bad batch, and hopefully it is a quick replacement. If…   Read more»

The mini-sim was luckily set in a way where civilized conversations solved the problems. We were lucky that the people involved trusted each other’s opinions and experience. It is not always like this in the world. Sometimes management does not…   Read more»

My first ideas is to call a meeting with as many of the project team members as possible, as soon as possible. In this meeting we would brain storm possible theories about what has gone wrong, why it has gone…   Read more»

A project manager would ideally have as much flexibility as possible while still being able to keep the project on track. It is important to have some give and be able to take surprises and work with them. However, if…   Read more»

Sometimes it is much better to entrust another company that has the experience, machinery, and manpower for a project component with it. It usually costs less to outsource things like this instead of having to create, test, and validate a…   Read more»

It never hurts to have a checklist. Especially once a few design meetings have passed and you stat to understand exactly what documentation is required of the meetings and the way that managers like the information being presented. Before you…   Read more»

For me, it depends on the project and the rest of the team. Sometimes you need someone very familiar with how a specific process works, then you need the specialized skills. Sometimes you have a team full of specialized members…   Read more»

With teams with varying skills, where for example each member may have a different specialty, I believe it is a good idea for those specialists to explain their ‘tips and tricks’ to the group during the project. This way the…   Read more»

My older internship used Microsoft teams. My current job uses slack. I like slack more as I find it has more flexibility in how it is used. For school projects, I’ve learned that the most useful platform will be whatever…   Read more»

Slack is important because there are almost always delays that happen during the course of a project. It is necessary to include slack in your project so that your scheduling timelines are not impossible to achieve. If I go over…   Read more»

One mostly unavoidable reason is unexpected delays or failures. The best way to avoid them is to be prepared and prepare project parts as soon as possible to try to be ahead of schedule. I’ve run into supplier delays, which…   Read more»

I agree not compiling lessons learned is a significant loss of opportunity. My coworkers and I have started a little ‘what did I learn this month’ lunch group where we sit and talk about new tricks we learned. This little…   Read more»

I do believe that the peeling labels are a bigger issue than they seem. Labels hold a lot of important information about a product. In this case the two more cantankerous points of information to loose is the material makeup…   Read more»

At my old job, we had a shared cloud service where all the documents were available. For projects where there are many iterations of these documents, we kept them in their own folders, so that you can see all the…   Read more»