Overall, I believe that all the objectives had been met and therefore believe that this project was a success as I had completed on time and had time to spare to check all my work and to the acceptable standard required.
Factors contributing to the outcome
A project requires various criteria’s to be filled to ensure a successful project.
Realistic Objectives
I had to take in account that my question could not be fully answered as it would have meant I would have had to create several of board games. This would have resulted to me finishing after the deadline. To ensure I did not fail I had chosen one of the most popular board games and incorporate a popular theme to it to make it appealing to my target audience.
Accurate Understanding of Requirements
I had to know if I was achieving my objectives. With my questionnaire result I would be able to see if I was reaching my objectives.
Effective Planning
When first starting my project I had realised I would need various plans for my artefact. This is because if it doesn’t go well the first time I won’t be able to produce it again as it would take too much time. I had done various plans with the help of my research; I had the when over them with my stakeholder. My stakeholder liked my final plan and from them I started to make my monopoly board. I had also asked the views of friends and family to get a better picture if my plan was good enough.
The project plan I had designed was essential as it would allocate tasks on different days to ensure that I do enough work every day and that I am not doing an overload in one day. However, this was sometimes the case as some incidents occurred which lead to me doing a lot of work in one day. Furthermore, having a project plan meant that I could adjust it when I had a problem and then I could see what this problem would result to.
Appropriate Resources
For most of project I needed a huge supply of stationary equipment. However, I did not have most of the supplies as the school did not allow their equipment to be taken out of school. This meant for several of task I had to improvise. For example I had to make my own tracing paper when making duplicates of the cards. Luckily, I was quite resourceful and we I did have equipment I took full advantage of it. I was very limited when it came to using technology as the school had lost power. This meant I had to do a lot of written work rather than using the computer. This gave to some delays but in my project plan I had room for delays.
User feedback
I have given some questionnaires to the students in my diploma class, to ask them about how I managed my project, which will show how my managerial skills were used for the project.
The students in my IT Diploma class have been chosen to answer my questionnaires as they will know how to answer as they are making a project and managing on their own.
I have given out questionnaires to 5 people, so I can have a feedback on my management skills for it to be fully assessed.
Firstly, I had asked for the opinions of my project plan because I thought I have made the right contributions to the project plan but from the questionnaires, I saw that majority of the people had selected ‘the right amount’ which meant that i had enough information on my project plan. Although other people had chosen ‘Too detailed’ because they think that I placed too much information on one action to do and thought that within in the start and finishing time, too much specific information was placed in and thought that it would be hard to stay in the time zone whilst working on something hard and specific like research.
Next I had asked that If they had selected ‘ Needs to be more detailed’, what do they think I should add and one specific person had said “you could have explained how things had to be done” ; This meant that I had to add more information and spread them all about rather than doing many information on one thing and not really on the other.
Then I had asked, Do you think its easy to follow? and majority had selected No, which meant that I should have made everything more simple and if I had members who wanted to use my project plan, then it would’ve been much more harder for them to understand them and then go towards another direction which could’ve resulted in a failed project. However, 2 people did say yes and a user said “Yes, by giving more details of how you managed your time”. This user is trying to say that it was easy to follow but I should have given a more descriptive text on how I managed my time.
My last question was, what improvements do you think I could’ve done? The users did not comment that much but one user had said that “Be less vague a specific actions planned” This had meant that I should’ve spent my time with the other things I had planned to even things out.
I created a questionnaire to many people of different ages and gender and asked them questions like do they like playing video games alone etc.. This question as well as the other questions helped boost my knowledge on the topic of how many play board games and video games and how many people play the types of games with other individual(s) or not.
I have given my questionnaires to 15 people to make sure that I do not have opinions from few people but loads. This will help me to achieve accurate results and a better understanding of the outcome of the results. I displayed my results into graphs with the information I have received from the questionnaires.
For the question, “Do you play board games with friends and/or family? most of the testers circled yes. 11 testers out of 15 testers had circled yes to the question therefore it gave me a better understanding of how many people play board games with friends and/or family and the other 4 testers out of 15 testers circled no, this yet again helped me to create a better understanding of the question and improve my knowledge on the proportion of testers who circled yes and no. Only 1 tester had circled not sure, so overall, you could see in the graph that the majority circled yes.
The question, “Do you play video games alone?” was typed up for people to answer because this is my primary questions for my essay as this question determines how many people play video games alone and if they are isolated from everyone. According to the graph and the feedback I received from the questionnaires, it was very hard to understand as it was a draw in terms of how many people circled the answers and it gave me a perplexing result, so I had to use my own knowledge to continue with my essay and the questionnaire.
The final question, “do you play 2 player+ games with other individual(s)?” the majority circled sometimes and then the second most circled was yes, so that made a good impression that people actually play with 2 players and more which shows that some people are not isolated all the time, as they play with other individuals. So it made a well-built conclusion to the questionnaire. The 2 people who have circled no perhaps plays video games alone and do not interact with anyone, so this is also good information.
The above graphs show the gender and the age group of how many people took and from the graph I could see that 16 to 18 year olds males were the majority who took in part in the questionnaire, so the outcome and results of the questions I asked them to circle could perhaps be their points of view and how they think of video games and if they isolate a gamer. I think this is a fair result as many females are not addicted as males therefore the majority of the testers were male but to make it fair I included females to make sure my outcome of my questionnaires and feedback I received wasn’t biased.
I have also included questions such as “What is your favourite: i. Board games ii. Video games. I have included thee questions because I want the testers to be interested in the questionnaire and have selected many popular and best selling games for video games and board games to make the testers have fun doing the questionnaire.
My stakeholder said in the minutes of meeting that I had managed independently throughout the whole project and had said that I had worked hard and had also finished the project before the project target end date and was also entered as an A* work.
Even though the end result of my project was successful, many problems had arisen. The information on my project was very limited and almost spending a day on just researching on the internet had lead me to draw a conclusion and a stop to the fact that there is not many stuff on the internet that is related to my question but then I had remembered the library and how it is a big place of information and place of knowledge and by luck, I had found some information that was related to my question and was satisfied with the required information and had decided to continue with my work.
Also, when downloading the project proposal form, the server had repeatedly displayed a 401 error sign which had mean that there were problems with the server which had then lead me to wait for the server to get back online so I can access and had wasted some of my timescales for the other stuff on my project plan.
Finally, I could say that the biggest flaw in my project was the time keeping of the project. I had plenty of time to finish every documents without rushing and had made the schedule very tight and with colliding with my revision for my GCSE I believe that I was putting a lot of stress and believe that if I had used the spare days and extended my timescales on the project, then it would’ve been even more of a success because the I would have got plenty of time to do everything without being strict on how much time I will spend one document and how long I will take to go to the next document.
Overall, I believe that not many mistakes and error were not made that I could improve on but nevertheless there were flaws and errors and If I had the chance to do it again then I would have had plenty of time to do everything and not sign of stress was not present when making the project.
Conclusion
After finishing the project, I could now see that the end result was a success. I have learnt that without the preparation plan of the project or the meetings and communications between the stakeholders, it would not have been a very good project and could have been an unsuccessful project.
I believe that I worked independently throughout the whole project, so I think that I should receive an A* mark for it as my project had been entered as an A* so i hope that with my managerial skills of the project, I should get a good mark.
