In this post, I am going to discuss the affects good planning can have on a project, as well as how working with a team efficiently can help you create a good project vs how not working well with your team and lacking a plan can be detrimental to the project.

Firstly, I shall discuss planning, but will explain how team working and planning go hand in hand when you are aiming for success.

When it comes to starting a new project, planning appropriately is an incredibly important part of getting started. The reason for this, is that when you plan, you have a clear idea of what needs to completed, by which member of your team and by what date and time. There are endless ways to plan a project, but my personal go to is the waterfall method for planning.This method is primarily aimed at software development, however it can be adapted to fit endless other types of projects with ease. It is the method am most familiar with as I studied it during my final year at college in length.

More recently, I have found that planning at university, especially in group projects, is even more vital than I had previously realised. It is almost definitely the difference between a pass and a fail. I have had the unfortunate chance to be on both sides while at university. Whilst at university, I have had two projects where we were asked to work in groups. The first being DP402 – Design Durability, the other, DP403 – Fixperts.

DP402 Design Durability:

At the beginning of the project, me, Matthew and Aaron barely knew each other. This being due to not having to previously work with each other, however, despite this, we chose to plan exactly what each of us needed to do for the project. We did this by creating a list of things we needed to do and then discussing our strengths and our weaknesses, and then dividing up the work to fit what each of us were best suited to doing. We then continued to work together consistently and proceed to develop a schedule we could all work with for when the project required us to work with each other in person. We made use of Google drives to upload and work on each of the documents we needed for our project, this helped us significantly to speed up our work progress as this meant we could all work on different parts of a single power point, at the same time. We could also all access everything we needed at all times and had no bottlenecks. This resulted in a fantastic project and a good final product.

Part of the plan, created on Google Drives using Excel

DP403 – Fixperts:

This project is a prime example of why not planning is planning to fail. The project began the same way as DP402, none of my new group knew each other, however, a key difference is that our planning was almost none existent until the final weeks of the project, which was a disaster waiting to happen. So what went wrong? As we did not plan effectively, our group very quickly not knowing what each person was supposed to be doing. This resulted in a lot of duplicated work, which meant 50% of the time spent on that work by those two people was wasted and could have been used elsewhere. Another reason failing to plan held us back was a complete lack of finding days to actually meet and work together, which just proceeded to further the projects slow decent down hill.

About two thirds of the way through, we finally put together a proper plan for the project. Marking what we had done off, then proceeding to identify what we needed to do and by when and who is tasked with each part. We did this by creating a shared Google drive, much like my group from the previous project, and making sure everyone had access to the tasks and work already created. This did help but at this point in the project it was already too late to recover properly. If we hadn’t have planned at this stage, I would have had no chance to recover in this project at all.

Later on, due to the lack of planning and team coordination, I was tasked with resubmitted with as I have missed the grade needed for a pass. However, this time, I planned my time significantly better and wrote down and referenced a task list. This allowed me to improve my work massively and create a PDF that I was actually proud of and wanted to submit, unlike the previous attempt.

I have definitely learned a real life lesson when it comes to planning. I now will plan every part of a project in future and it also helps to plan the things you need to do outside of education and the work place. It makes a serious difference, and makes getting a project done go from impossible to a walk in the park, provided you plan accordingly.