Capstone in real-time: Following the journey of the 2020–21 Blue Goji team and creating additional value for the industry sponsor
← Previous: Read about how the Blue Goji team found a work-around their resource constraints
Third challenge: Creating additional value for the industry sponsor
At our final check-in with the Blue Goji team, the team was well-functioning in the “performing” stage and familiarized with each other’s leadership and working styles. The improved communication (see Part 1) between the sub-teams — Gaming and Data — helped move the project forward. The sub-teams shared regular feedback from each other and were efficient in debugging any arising issues. However, there was unanticipated lag time with the workarounds identified in the “norming” stage (see Part 2). The team relied on their industry sponsor affiliates to gather data, which the affiliates obtained on top of their full-time jobs. This led to delays in the team’s procurement and analysis of the datasets. In an optimal scenario, the team would have been able to gather data more frequently (on their own schedule) to guide the development of the VR games. Given the limited data and time, the team worried about not producing a quality deliverable that met their standards. Although the team was unable to do the in-depth research and analyses they had hoped for, they shifted their efforts and made…Key decisions in creating *additional value* for stakeholders:
- Being proactive in thinking “outside the box” and flexible with the project scope. There may be adjacent opportunities to create value for the industry sponsor.
- Get the most out of limited resources, whether that be during testing sessions or time with stakeholders. The team incorporated additional testing parameters with minimal disruption to the project scope and timeline.
- Utilize lag times to identify outstanding issues and/or potential solutions. There is often an aspect of the project that can be worked upon during these times.
Downstream effects:
Originally, the team was tasked with developing games for challenging a participant’s balance (fruit catching) and posture (wall shape matching). The measurement of the two parameters — balance and posture — required the inaccessible prototype treadmill. To combat this limitation, the team prudently explored an array of potential parameters that did not require the prototype treadmill. One unexplored parameter was the comparison of accuracy between their newly developed VR games and past teams’ VR games. This added evaluation ended up being immensely valuable and informative to the industry sponsor. For additional information, see the team’s capstone project — Blue Goji Project Brief:
Blue Goji capstone team: Creating value for the industry sponsor (3/3) was originally published in Berkeley Master of Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
