The agenda for the first day of the trip to La Jolla revolved around the results of my summer placement, and formed an informal After Action Review (AAR), which I'm used to from my days as a Project Manager. Essentially, a project in technical terms is defined as a "temporary endeavor to produce a unique product or service". The major aspect of a project is therefore to actually deliver to scope the product/service in which is was commissioned for, but over and above delivery of the end goal, the 'journey' taken within each project can be valuable in itself, and without documenting this journey, such knowledge is lost into the ether, with the risk that lessons learned will not be remembered, and problems encountered will be repeated in future projects.
The major discussion point from this project is that I was unable to complete on time to initial scope. The Project Management community frequently talk of the 'triple constraint' which essentially states that there are 4 key traits of a project - time, scope, cost and quality - and that the underlying driver is high quality. After the project is first scoped, costed and scheduled, any deviations to one of cost, time or scope will have a knock-on effect to the other two, thus a triple constraint. During this project I effectively lost 25% of my time due to external factors (poor processes and procedures within the Department in question). As the cost component was irrelevant (there was only me, and I could not recruit additional people to help as this was an individual masters project) I could either have carried on regardless with the full scope, but sacrificed quality, or I could reduce the scope and maintain quality. I opted for the latter and therefore removed the 3rd and final deliverable from project scope.
The external collaborator (key project stakeholder) was extremely pleased with the results obtained for deliverables 1 and 2, and agreed that removal of deliverable 3 was sensible given the time constraints. Furthermore, as my supervisor will be taking on another masters degree student in October (12-month full time research), that deliverable 3 should be incorporated into this new project.
Instead of documenting the After Action Review in the form of a more normal AAR document, I decided to integrate background, lessons learned and future work into a Handover Document for my supervisors next masters student. I do hope that this becomes useful to him in due course.
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