Project Management

Project Management

In project management, we will go over how we stayed on track or deviated from both the schedule and the budget based on the scope statement and budget forms.

Schedule

Based on our Gantt chart we initially stayed on track for phase 1 “Project Start” and phase 2 “Planning”, but once we reached phase 3 “Project Assembly” our schedule started to suffer setbacks. We were able to get parts for the original pump circuit right away with Amazon Prime and the local shop Hardcore Electronics.

The parts for the temperature sensing circuit weren’t all collected mainly due to shipping times until March 11th. All parts were supposed to be collected by February 28th.

With the pump circuit initially working after building it on a breadboard we were originally on schedule until the next time we used it and it no longer worked properly. With suggestions from Professor Hegger and using Chat GPT various additions were made to help stabilize the circuit and hopefully get it working as intended. Testing of the circuit was supposed to be completed by March 9th but kept on going till March 24th with the intermittent fault with the timer never solved, which we believe is due to the infrared sensor not working as it was supposed to since receiving it.

After we decided to build a new pump circuit based on feedback from our technical advisor, this put us behind schedule. We had the new pump circuit built on the breadboard by March 18th and began testing, which as of April 1st we got it to run but not as well as we would like. As mentioned previously, we also continued to work on our original pump circuit.

The original pump circuit was soldered to a printed circuit board on March 25th, ten days behind when we wanted our circuit soldered by March 15th.

Our presentation date is April 10th so we still have another week to try to finish building the sanitizer unit, but it looks like we will probably not get it to a finished state on time.

Our final SPI number was 0.97 as we managed to finish most tasks just not on time. (Figure 6,7)

Budget

The budget for our project was $1,409.75 our final actual cost is $1,613.00. For parts, we went $25.47 over budget overall not bad considering we built a second pump circuit. The labour costs went $177.78 over budget which is less than we expected. The relatively low over-budget labour number was due to doing other portions of the project faster than planned. Even with testing taking a lot longer than planned we used the planned time from another project task where we were ahead making us go over budget but not as badly as anticipated.

Our final CPI was 0.86 (Figure 6,7). With the addition of a second pump circuit and testing of both circuits taking longer than planned this jumped our price over budget.

With our SPI being 0.97 and CPI being 0.86 this shows that we were behind schedule and over budget.