Weekly Progress Reports (see sidebar), the Gantt chart, and this Project Management page should be printed out before meetings with the sponsor and instructor.
All team members should be able to explain all items on the progress report.
Place a "*" at the beginning of the title of the active week Progress Report (see * in sidebar).
Project Objectives
Concisely list and prioritize the project objectives and constraints
High Priority Objectives
Dispense product from a stack
Automatically insert product and backing into packaging
Second Priority Objectives
Automatically seal the packaging once product is inside
Mobile packaging system
Other Constraints and Issues
Money. Project budget is not significantly large, and all parts in the final iteration of the project must be relatively cheap to replace.
Parts must be easily replaceable.
WOW Design Solution
Ask what would their dream design solution would be like. You may not achieve this, but it is good to know what it would be like.
They hope to have a space efficient, low cost, fully automatic for single units, with higher efficiency than 160 units packaged per hour.
Risk Reduction Strategy
List areas of risk and strategy that will be used to eliminate risk really in the design process.
Risk reduction is to test the current design of the packaging process. Mainly, the risk reduction targets the possibility of using material that the sponsor already has in supply and knows how to easily obtain. We placed value in maintaining similar materials to what is currently used.
Specifically, we want to test a method of holding the plastic sleeve open, using a vacuum, and placing the cardboard insert and product into the plastic sleeve. We can complete both a preliminary hardware test and a theoretical analysis of the hardware test for our risk reduction.
Intermediate Milestones
Identifying meaningful intermediate milestones is a critical for effective project management. Together with your sponsor identify such milestones, and specify specific performance requirements you aim to meet at each milestone.
Intermediate milestones correspond to completing each individual subassembly which completes a single process of the total packaging process. Later milestones include syncing up the assemblies and linking them together so that the outputs of one subassembly can be fed into the next subassembly.
These milestones are in more detail on the gantt chart.
Milestones include:
Completing risk reduction.
Finalizing 1st iteration of the design
Completing Hardware
Rough System completion (before optimization)