Academy Project Review
This summer I was working on making a website for the academy. Our small groups were working on this small project for nearly 2 months. This was not the only work we were doing this summer but this one was one of the biggest concerns I have. And I received the first data about the test yesterday, and the test results were more satisfying than I thought. The result gave me great relief. In the process of developing products for the company, I was able to learn two big things.
Even though I played a role in the project as a PM, I had difficulty delivering information in the process of communicating with team members because my CS knowledge was very insufficient. Because of my lack of knowledge I needed to explain the details to the team member several times. I didn’t know how to give draft making a website. And had a hard time finding out what kind of support our teammates needed. As these problems pile up, the team members lose their motivation, so the project got slower. Because of these reasons, I’m trying to learn about the roles of PM through some Udemy classes and trying to be better with the next project.
The second thing I learned during this project was how hard a simple project could be without experience. Before I tried to start the project I thought the project will be a piece of cake since we were just making one single webpage to display the result of the quarterly test. The company was concerned about having more than 4000 students’ test results that we needed to analyze. Based on my experience of dealing with hundreds of thousands of data with computers, I thought there was no possibility of errors, and I focused on finding differences in the grade data we were going to make. However, when the work began, they faced difficulties even before scoring. I thought I could just scan and read the program and score it, but there were many errors in the students’ OMR card notation itself, and there were many difficulties in the process of turning 4,000 OMR cards into scanners. Below were some examples that made me hard to finish the project.
This kind of OMR was not readable inside of the program since the dot the student checked was so small. But still, this mistake could be laughed off. The next one made me want to cry in the process of processing the data.
Students in middle school and older understand the basic principles of OMR cards, and it was too hard for the OMR cards that supervisors had already reviewed to have this kind of problem. These are just some examples I could remember now. I had to revise more than 200 OMR cards because of small and big problems. This teaches me a lesson that experience is important. The company supervisor who I worked with had more than 20 years of experience in this kind of test and he was warning me about these kinds of problems before we started the project. This taught me the importance of experience in a project. Even though it was a project that simply scored and posted report cards on the website, it was blocked and faced various difficulties, but I am confident that I will not make the same mistake next time. Through this job, I could feel firsthand how much experience can play in the project.