Saturday, June 5, 2010

Final Project Report

— What’s going well?
Sister Catherine Dunne from the Daughters of Charity came to our class to receive the work we did on the project. She said that we had captured the essence of St. Joseph's Services in the video. She seemed very pleased and thought that the other Daughters would be thrilled also. Sister Dunne said it looked like we gave the project our all and that we produced A+ work. We also recieved a letter from Lisa Sullivan stating the project was outstanding and she was very happy with the outcome. I feel all the effort our team put into the project is appreciated. I am very pleased with everything we did and think it looks professional, polished and cohesive. I am proud of our team and all our individual expertise lent to a unified product that we were able to deliver completed and on time.

— What’s not going so well?
Just have to tie up a few loose ends on the portfolio site and then we are all done! Amelia did a fine job in leading us to make deadlines and I'm sure this one will be met also. It is a very hectic time of year for students as we are trying to complete final coursework. It would have been nice to have a written handout that specifically detailed what was required in the final portfolio to be able to work towards that in the proceeding weeks. However, our team works effectively together so I do not have any doubts that these loose ends will be tied up and that we will be able to present a cohesive, unified portfolio piece for all of us to share. I am optimistic that it will be equally professional and complete as the project we present to St. Joseph's Services.

— My specific contributions to our project this week included the final touches on the brochure, cleaning up over 100 photos for the video, and making finalized notations for the portfolio.

— Any final project reflections?
As I have mentioned before, I would have liked to have seen the text + image be a more consistent theme across the project but since we were working with actual clients, we had to meet their needs. However, I think by adding the textual elements in the video, we were able to incorporate text + image into the project very nicely.
Using the Basecamp website as a project management platform seemed to work for this project. It was relatively easy to follow up on threads and be in-tune to what was happening on a day to day basis. Having different thread for various aspects of the project was helpful to It was also nice to be able to find files, see them as thumbnails, and download them to our individual PCs as needed. Having Basecamp as a management tool adopted program-wide for NMS is a good idea to toy with in lieu of Blackboard but with so many project management tools available, such as PBworks or Google Wave, it really boils down to preference.