Charter

This week has been all about looking forward for the Capstone project. Having met with the client and determining the big picture deliverables to be completed over the next couple of months, my partner and I used this week to plan and write our project charter. The charter is extremely important, as it outline the specific tasks to be completed by the two of us, as well as the due dates. This task- of designing and assigning our project for the next 3 months- has proven to be slightly more complicated than initially met the eye. 

Knowing the overall task at hand is not hard to realize; it is parsing out the components of a complicated end goal and self-determining when to complete what that makes a project finish-able (but also tasks us with quite a planning process here at the onset). In hindsight, it will be extremely valuable to have worked out the foreseeable kinks from the beginning. It was intimidating to envision so much, but- having now done it- I am glad to have the road map for the rest of the semester.

One revelation from this process of writing the charter was that my partner and I needed to have a clarifying discussion with our client about several aspects of the project. We realized that there were some vague expectations, as well as several aspects of our task that we interpreted differently from our client. My partner emailed Michelle to get these clarifications. This revelation further emphasized the importance of communication for this project (between both my partner and myself, and the two of us and our client).

Looking forward, I am excited to continue molding out this project, and to see how the plan changes from what it now appears to be. We may have chartered out the next few months, but I know that there will be many adjustments and changes that will make this project that much more interesting, real, difficult, and rewarding.