Fike Recreation Postmortum Report
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Post Mortem
Our team’s project was improving processes at the second floor Fike Recreation Desk. The team did achieve the goals set in the mission statement. The system used at the Fike Recreation Desk was improved and employees now have a useful training program. The system at the Fike Recreation Desk now can successfully accomplish all of the tasks that it is expected to perform.
The most positive aspects of our project were the costs. The development cost was minimal, because the system utilized supplies already at the desk and the new materials used during development could also be used as the final product, and so were finally listed as implementation costs, not development costs. The maintenance cost or continuing operating cost was very low which turned out to be good because the team was worried that we would implement this system and a year or so down the road it would come back to hurt the client with a maintenance cost after our project group was long gone. The team didn’t want that to have to happen to our client. In addition, our project was actually a system design, not a product design, so few physical products were produced. Instead, our products were steps or arrangements of supplies, which are ideas not physical products. All these factors contributed to the positive results of our project.
A more negative aspect of this project was development time. The timing in the semester was bad due to the fact that our project dealt with the handling of many registration procedures. Registration consists of an enormous process at the beginning of a semester. Unfortunately our project did not begin until most registrations were completed. We were able to overcome this little hiccup but it would have been much more pleasing had a registration deadline occurred during our project to enable us to test in a realistic environment. Another issue involving the development time was our use of the given time. Though the time allotted was sufficient to complete the project, our use of that time was somewhat inefficient. The team tended to leave some project parts to the last minute or not take advantage of meeting times to accomplish all that could have been accomplished. One problem with a group of this nature is that the members have so many classes in common. Test days and days large assignments were due in other classes were occasionally sacrificed to study or work together on these common distractions. Another problem encountered was the availability of our client and desk workers. Our lab time, the most convenient time to meet with our client and employees, was near lunch time, and a short break in which the desk is not staffed. Even with prior notice, sometimes our client would be gone when we came to meet with him, and testing times during lab were very limited due to the work schedules of employees. In addition, the team felt that constantly having to make PowerPoint presentations for the show and tells and for the real presentations was somewhat detrimental and distracting to our group accomplishing that project because it was time consuming and distracting from the goals of the project. These were some of the problems encountered during the project.
We had many helpful tools to assist us in this project. The needs statements were extremely helpful in determining what the client, users, and stakeholders wanted from the desk, but the best method for the project was probably the benchmarking. Benchmarking allowed the team to realize where the current system stood on the aspects measured by the metrics and also how the system compared with other similar systems. From the benchmarking we were able to see what areas of the system needed the bulk of our concentration and what areas needed little or nearly no help. We wanted to improve everything, but from the benchmarking we realized that some aspects were good enough that if we had no improvement they would still meet our marginal values and in some cases they had already achieved the ideal value we set for that metric. Overall, benchmarking was very helpful because it helped us be able to see where we stood with the project and helped us to map out where we were going to go in order to create a better and more efficient system at the Fike Recreation Desk. The show and tells and presentations served as a great chance to let Dr. Greenstein see what we have accomplished and allowed him have a chance to comment and advise about what we have done and what we were planning to do next. All these tools and methods were beneficial to this project.
A major problem the team came across a few problems due to the time in the semester that our project took place was not a heavy time for customers using the Fike Recreation Desk. The majority of people who use the desk use it for registration which takes place in the first couple weeks of each semester or utilize the desk for information about other programs beginning at the start of the semester. The team wasn’t assigned to the desk until after this heavy registration time therefore we couldn’t gather the full registration process to see what needs to be improved and adjusted to better the process. This project performance is simplified and made much easier by just staying in total contact with the client and talking with the client as often as possible. It was found throughout the project that the communication was lower with our client and seemed more difficult than projects where we stayed in constant contact with the client. The book stressed so much on the methods and process to perform but it does not emphasize the importance of good communication with the client.
The team felt that if we had to add something to the book to further help in future students’ projects we would explain the importance of staying in contact and having good communication with the client. We’d also stress the importance of good documentation of all test results, procedures, and interviews to avoid confusion and prevent having to do work twice. Report writing can be made infinitely simpler if graphs and tables are already prepared, and all information is condensed into one location.
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