Week Three Day Five...

Reflection:

These past 9 weeks have been a great learning experience in terms of the role I was playing. I have learnt a lot about Delegation, Time Management, Organisation and Project Management overall. I think the final product was a sucess, as towards the end of the developement the whole cohort pulled together to produce a really good system. We have done things which have worked and things which haven't worked as well. For example using the current version of the system to implement the features on, then merge them together was a good idea, but we only started using this method on the final week. I think if we were better organised in the earlier stages, ie define what the roles actually did and planned earlier, I think this would have made a lot of difference. Once we got into the development stage, it was hard to see the project moving forward. The main reason to this was because we did not have a final list of user requirements - and this kept changing on a daily basis which was not good for the project. Lack of communication was a big issue - some people didn't know what they were doing, but this was down to a number of reasons, ie that person not attending or poor communication with in the specialist groups.

I am looking to go into Project Management in the future which is the main reason why I decided to take the role of a 'manager'. From this project I have gained a lot of confidence and realised that planning and organisation is key to any successful project. There were a lot of hard times, mainly I found hard delegating tasks with in my peers - even though it was not my responibility too. How ever every suggestion I thought of, I did ask for feedback or any other ways of doing it, but this was not the case. A lot of people were moaning about how they did not the get the opportunity too to express their views but they were wrong in some cases. Through out the project I had a lot of help from Jennie Bate, Rob Morrisby, Richard Gibbons, James Tubb and Dan Ransom and as a team I think we worked well together and couldn't have acheieved all this on my own.

Just to conclude, I am hoping I will get a similar opportunity in the future whether it be on placement or at university to put in to practice what I have learnt over the past 9 weeks.