Project Tip # 1 – Work on your Mission Statement or Objective

Sometimes  queries come through relating to project management tools and principles, which indicates that experiences and lessons learnt from extensive projects are often overlooked. Hopefully these thoughts will at the very least spark a thought on how to improve your project at this early stage, or prompt you to research some project management principles and processes on your own.

The tips for this article:

Question … What problem are you addressing? This essentially refers to mission statements or project objectives. Often when teams get together to solve a problem, there seems to be agreement of what the problem is, however people’s interpretation of problems, and what they should do to solve a problem is seldom identical.

The initial problem may be as simple as “We need to win the Challenge”, but think of the effect of 3 or 4 people on the team actually using this as a starting point and extending the statement by agreeing on how this is going to be done. A clearly defined and well articulated statement (that everybody agrees with) helps team members to focus on the core problem that they are trying to solve.

To summarise:

• Allow everybody in the team to contribute to the statement and if necessary to be able to tweak it as time in the project increases.
• Ensure that key stakeholders such as lecturers and mentors understand and agree with the mission statement.
• Make sure that your mission statement is in line with the priorities of the organisations that are sponsoring the project (in this case SEW Eurodrive and Festo).

Think about it:

Review the PneuDrive Challenge project guidelines and think about how to use concepts from the guidelines, for example:

• Hygiene in the Food and Beverage Industry
• Generate interest and show accuracy
• Speed, positioning, accuracy, acceleration and deceleration, repeatability and cycle time.
• Energy efficiency
• Life cycle calculations
• Detailed budget proposal.