In this task, the goal was to save the egg from a 10 feet drop, and we had 25 minutes to plan and 10 minutes to actually carry out the plan and build a contraption out of straws and tape. Our group actually thought we only had 15 minutes to plan, but as the time went on, we saw that nobody got their materials yet at the 15 minute mark so that problem was behind us.
While planning we eventually saw our groups strengths and weaknesses. Things that worked out in our favor was being right next to the scissors, and having a person who really wanted to drop the egg and felt confident about dropping it. Some weaknesses included too many discussions at once, and everybody has their own plans of how to build the model. Our group went from strategy to strategy, encasing the egg in a cube, a triangle, or even having it suspended in a rectangle. These were pretty difficult to make, and another plan of just wrapping straws around the egg was devised. The strengths of having it enclosed or suspended were that it wouldn't touch the ground at all and the straws would take all the impact, but they were hard to make. We didn't choose a tactical plan, we wanted to try to see if we could build the harder models first, and if that didn't work, we would just wrap straws around the egg. The group didnt have a full consensus on the model because we ended up just doing the wrap method because group members were worried there wouldn't be enough time to finish building. We also didn't design it specifically, as we made adjustments as we saw fit on the actual model, then drew it later.
Everybody had a role, whether it be the egg dropper, time keeper, model builders, tape person, straw handler, model designer. While we did go through the last step, it wasn't too organized, we didnt measure progress towards the goal, we just put anything we saw fit onto the model to accomplish our goal and hoped for the best. We went through Steps 1-4, but 5 basically we skipped as we had a plan but didn't follow it specifically. Our egg ultimately cracked, and was a result of our decent planning, but cracking under pressure when we felt we didnt have enough time to produce a better model, and had really no excellent plan for the alternative model. The group could have been more effective in planning the alternative strategy, since in the end thats the strategy we used. Next time I believe the group should follow through on its optimal plan and if not then we need a better alternative plan. But sometimes even if theres the best planning, if the idea isnt good then the planning ultimately is going to be irrelevant.
2 comments:
The alternative strategy is something which always helps at the last minute. Some of the class members were planned before the class as the assignment was posted in the afternoon..that is what I was told.
But the good things is that this exercise taught us how to deal with real life situations where we have to come up with alternatives and solutions to problems within a small timeframe.
Management is an art of not only dealing with management issues at work but all aspects of life.
yeah there were too much discussions because people have different ideas and they wished the group follows their ideas.
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