“Your final project did not meet what I asked for - therefore I will not be able to let you finish your first degree..."

A True Story! This sentence was told to me by the doctoral student who guided us in the engineering project two days before the date we were supposed to finish the first degree in electrical and computer engineering. At the beginning of that year, I found a project partner and supervisor. We met with the doctoral student, who led the project, and we received the requirements. The project was defined as a technical task - take a well-known algorithm, simulate it, and implement it on a real-time system. We started working and implemented the algorithm given in the simulation, and then the problems began - the algorithm did not work. We struggled with the simulation for an entire semester, and then our story got a twist!!!

In discussions with the supervisor and the doctoral student, we discovered that the problem was not defined correctly and that the algorithm we implemented in the simulation could not solve it. In the middle of the year, the project took a new direction - from a practical project to a challenging research with great uncertainty! This meant we had to restart a project twice as big and finish it in half the time!!!! Today it is clear to me that this is an unreasonable demand, but we were young and inexperienced, we wanted the project to succeed, so we continued working. We found an algorithm, implemented it in a simulation, showed that it solves the new problem and updated the supervisors, who were satisfied with the results. Since the contents of the project doubled in the middle of the year - we reached a situation where there was not enough time left to finish the contents that were agreed upon at the beginning of the year (to implement the algorithm in real time). We contacted the supervisor and the doctoral student and received an answer that we would submit what we did and wait for feedback. A month after we submitted the final report - the doctorate student came back with the dramatic announcement - just two days before the end of the year! what?????

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Frustration! Nerves! Remorse! Bad feeling! Mutual accusations! Self-blame! We left the meeting shocked - we have two days left to finish the degree! What to do? How will we finish the project? Can we finish successfully even after changing the requirements in the middle of the project? Is it likely to happen in every project? Is it possible otherwise? Today, after about 20 years in research and development (R&D) - about half in academia and about half in industry - I can answer these questions with a definite yes!!!!!!

 

Anyone can learn and implement easily, in a short time and gain tools for managing a research or technical project without prior training or sophisticated tools! How to plan a project, understand the magnitude of the challenge, define the tasks, understand what can be done by the end of the project, be in contact with the stakeholders, deal with changes and finish the project such that everyone are satisfied.

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Want to know how my story ends? Are you an engineering graduate or fourth year engineering student? Send me a message and tell me what was/is your biggest challenge in the project? And I will tell you how the story ends.