Lessons Learned

When students go about doing their projects for the greater Blacksburg community, they find that they run into a lot of roadblocks that make the project much more rocky and difficult than it should be. These are several of the lessons that students have learned doing this project and wish they could've adapted at the beginning of the project in order to accomplish their goal more smoothly and efficiently:

• Assigning roles for each group member and sticking to those roles

• Have a planning phase and execution phase for your project

• Let the documents that you've written out with your group guide the process of the project 

• Communication and coordination is critical with your group members but also with your customers in order to build a strong relationship

• Be ready to adapt to any situation that presents itself as things change over time

• Find ways to achieve greater community engagement in order to accomplish your goal with your customer

• Try to be ahead of schedule if possible this will help free up time in your project to tidy things up

• Don't be vague in your writing of tasks for group members, roles should be clearly defined

• Anticipate what your day will look like with your customer and make adjustments and preparations accordingly

• Come into kick-off meetings better prepared with more ideas

• Be more proactive in communicating with your sponsor

• Plan out a main, cohesive event for the whole project

• Things will happen if you take the initiative 

• It is difficult to coordinate efforts with team members with everyone's different schedules

• Time is your biggest enemy and manage it accordingly

• Not every situation will satisfy your expectations and you'll have to adjust

• Change is inevitable and it can lead to great but also bad things happening

• Some stakeholders over-promise before they fully understand the commitment

• The project manager is key to having a successful project by keeping the entire team focused and providing direction on project goals

• Always have a contingency plan on hand

• Being responsible for one's own individual tasks that were assigned to them

• Planning needs to be meticulous to not cause confusion amongst group members but also to sponsor 

• Have a realistic goal and know the capabilities of your group and at what scale you want to pursue your project