Project Management Homework for Multidisciplinary Senior Design I Weeks7/8

P11227

Kyle Desrosiers

Greg Wodzicki

Chris VanWagenen

Brad Fiedler

Project management homework for Multidisciplinary Senior Design I – Weeks7/8

DUE Date:Friday, February 4, at 6 pm

1. Your project plan should be built on a work breakdown structure (WBS) that gives your project some organization. Is the WBS you chose initially working? How do you know? (offer some evidence that it is or is not working as you intended).

-The work breakdown structure we chose has been working well. The group has been able to tackle several tasks simultaneously by splitting the workload accordingly. Each team member has become the “expert” of a particular area of the project, and in this way those sections of the project can be studied and completed in greater depth.

1. How many of the risk mitigation actions that you defined when you did your risk assessment are now included in your project schedule? List a couple of examples.

-One risk assessment item that became true in our case was customer needs changing. Our customer needs changed fairly deeply into our project, and much of the work we had done was not irrelevant, but not directly related to our new project scope. With the proper customer needs from the beginning, more progress could have been made earlier. This challenge came via lack of communication and poor direction initially in regards to who our customer actually was.

1. Have the updates that have been made to your plan occurred because there were things wrong with the plan that could have been anticipated – e.g. omitting major project subsets – or are the updates simply things like a 2 week planned task that took 3 weeks? List a couple of examples.

-The updates that have been made to our plan occurred due to significant alteration of our customer needs, as well as the customer altogether. This could not have been anticipated since there were major communication issues that began in our project from the beginning that was unknown to us.

-Another issue we have had is the example given in the problem statement. We had a few items scheduled for a single week of work that ended up taking two plus weeks to complete. These items were delayed due to customer need issues as well as not allotting the proper time limits in the first place.

1. Does your project have a clearly identifiable critical path? Are you paying close attention to doing those activities with as little time wasted (delays, interruptions) as possible? Offer an example or two that supports your answer.

-Now that we have clearly identified the proper customer as well as the appropriate customer needs, our project now has a clearly defined critical path. Due to the nature of our project and the current position we are in (being behind a couple weeks) we have been forced to pay close attention to activities that are essential to the project’s progression. Minimizing wasted time has become essential and we have been working much more efficiently as a result.Our critical path includes both bottom-up and tops-down research. We are currently in the process of testing and prototyping to better understand the problem. At the same time, we are conducting an extensive amount of research surrounding the topic. These two aspects are the most incremental parts of our project at this time. With this data and research, we can progress towards our next critical items such as our detailed design which includes detailed drawings, bill of materials, and proof of concept. Mechanical aspects of the project include material selection and duct lengths which will have to work directly with the electrical portion of the project. For example, system response time will drive duct length so that sound waves can be properly aligned out of phase with each other. Other aspects of electrical design include power supply and proper algorithm to drive our Active Noise Control system.