Organizational Changes
Overall, the organization of the team was well thought out before the process of creating the prototype of the device. Although the organization of the team and the project was thought out beforehand, there are still adjustments that could have been made in order to ensure that everything goes as smoothly as possible. One such method is to adjust how sprints were used throughout the entire project. When they were being used near the beginning of the project, all of the information and tasks were bundled together, making it hard to understand which tasks were being done by which subteam as well as when everything was planned on being completed. Another change that could have made the project smoother was to have more inter-subteam cooperation. This would have been especially helpful during the middle and late stages of the project, especially when all the subteams were trying to integrate with each other.
Timeline Adjustments
A few timeline changes would have made the flow of the project a little smoother and possibly led to great success of the project. The team generally progressed well and made a lot of progress during the entire project duration. At the end of the project there was a large time crunch where a lot of things needed to be done in a short amount of time. It would have been nice to have more buffer room to complete tasks. Things often took longer than anticipated so adding additional time to account for this would be beneficial. Similarly, integrating the different subteams sooner would have helped the overall project. This was difficult to achieve due to setbacks in manufacturing and redesigns. General advice about the timeline is to not be complacent. If it seems that you are ahead of schedule do not get complacent and comfortable because the schedule will catch up to you.
Advice to Future Capstone Teams
When reflecting on these past two semesters and the interim period, the team has a couple pieces of advice that could be helpful for incoming seniors. One of the major takeaways was based on what we think our team did successfully, which was being on top of deadlines. Our team leader, Charlotte, did a good job of reminding us of when bi-weekly reports were due, when we had an upcoming 5-minute presentation, and when we had to either complete a report, website update, or final presentation. Because we were never writing reports at the last minute, there was never tension in the team to get our assignments done. Our last piece of advice is if you are working on a project that involves an audience that you do not have anything, or not that much in common with, it is a good idea to speak directly with them. One of the major resources for our team during the interim and second semester were our three interviews. The people we interviewed were able to not only answer our questions about what design would best fit their needs, but they were also able to ask us their own questions and bring up topics that we never thought about before. While we could have assumed certain needs/wants of our audience, speaking to them directly made it easier for us when making design choices.