This week Team Stratagem held our biweekly liaison meeting and presented our project and prototype during Prototype Inspection Day. First, on Monday, we met virtually with our liaisons and clarified their requirements and expectations. On Tuesday, we presented our prototype to 6 judges and received very valuable feedback. The most common suggestion was that we should better explain what CAE is and what they do. We had previously created some of our presentations with our liaisons and sponsors at CAE as the target audience, and we would not need to explain their company to them. We will now develop slides to explain CAE at the beginning of non-CAE or open presentations.

This week Team Stratagem presented our project to the IPPD class and prepared our prototype demo and presentation for next week. We met on Monday virtually to prepare for presenting our project and current implementation and testing ideas to the class on Tuesday. On Tuesday we then presented to the class in the final lecture session of this semester and the presentation went well. We received some important feedback such as us needing to further explain our sponsor, CAE. We then spent the rest of the week preparing our Prototype Inspection Day (PID) presentation and demo. The image below shows Yuri and Will brainstorming the User Interface during a meeting.

This week Team Stratagem reviewed our Prototype Design feedback with our liaison and our coach. We met virtually with our liaison and coach on Monday and discussed the User Interface flow, our backend implementation, and our algorithmic implementation. We then met with our coach on Wednesday and identified what our next steps should be: to create concrete examples of our use cases and identify how we will account for resource constraints. We also assigned research and programming tasks to be done over the weekend before our next meeting. Next week we will meet in person with our coach, Dr. Jiang, and will also prepare for our Prototype Inspection.

This week Team Stratagem traveled to Tampa to present our prototype design plan to our sponsors, CAE. First we rehearsed our presentations on Monday and Wednesday, before we traveled to CAE’s Tampa headquarters on Thursday. We met our liaison Brian Stensrud and our executive sponsor Chris Catoe in person. We also had the privilege to meet the president of CAE USA, Merrill Stoddard, and were able to discuss CAE’s current business and future potential with him.

This week Team Stratagem participated in a peer review of our Preliminary Design Review (PDR) Presentation. We met several times beforehand to practice and review our presentation, and overall our presentation went well. There are several improvements for us to make before our actual PDR, which we have started to make. We also started brainstorming the User Interface (UI) of our application. We decided to make a VS Code style interface for flexibility and ease of use. Below is a video demo of the UI we intend to implement.

Next week we will travel to Tampa to present our prototype design at the CAE headquarters. We are excited to meet our liaison and stakeholders in person, and to get feedback on our prototype design ideas.

This week, Team Stratagem focused on creating fleshed out, top-down approach to our project architecture. Our first step was to lay out the client side and server side components. Next, we went into the actual flow of user interaction. The UI should support multiple workflows like login, project selection, and schedule imports, with support for CSV, XLSX, and MPP files. We also considered a clickable interface vs an AI chatbot for users to specify their scheduling wants via natural language.

Discussing User Flows and Edge Cases

We then discussed database architecture, sketched out the relationships between fields in our database, including user authentication information and scheduling information, and we will continue to flesh out the rest of our project for the upcoming Preliminary Design Review.

This week, Team Stratagem focused on solidifying the group plans and roles for the immediate future. Pictured below is an outline of the phases for each step of the project. It began with Context Research, which has allowed us to get a good feel of the scope and expectations of the project. Out next step is to explore UX and algorithmic design possibilities, by combining our ideas from brainstorming last week with group research.

Our current task is to work towards a prototype for the user interface, as well as a prototype for the scheduling algorithm. This would act as a baseline for further improvements before we tackle software architecture, implementation, and testing.

After an invaluable workshop from Florida Power and Light about process improvement with Six Sigma, our team began to organize exactly what we needed to tackle to get our project moving. This started with a brainstorming session: the blue post-it notes were potential problems that we could face with our final product, and the pink notes represented the solutions.

Additionally, we assessed potential risks and brainstormed how to minimize and mitigate them. Next, we conceptualized a project roadmap and began adding to our product backlog on our team Jira. We also began thinking of ways to design our user interface, as well as began researching algorithms for resource constrained project scheduling.

Our next step is to continue the ideation, brainstorming, and research of these components.

After finalizing our logo (see below) and learning about ideation, we finally had the opportunity to meet with our liaison!

Team Stratagem’s Logo

This week was all about getting to know our project. It started with a review of our Scope of Work, and progressed into a discussion of our Project Needs and Specifications. We were able to have a multitude of our questions answered, and we’re ready to tackle the next steps of our project: creating a project roadmap and researching open-source scheduling algorithms.

It has begun!

We’re excited to start working with CAE and our coach this IPPD year. Our team, Stratagem, is working on an AI-assisted scheduler, where we aim to use machine learning to optimize project scheduling.

We’ve hit the ground running with the initial phase of our project. So far, we’ve began development of our team logo, finalized our team role, and assigned roles:

Yuri Gelli: Team Leader, Finance and Travel Coordinator
Matthew Davis: Research Librarian
Rachel McCallum: Webmaster
Thomas Weber: Template Manager
Caleigh Zaguirre: Scribe, Facilitator
William Zhu: Timekeeper

We also met with our project coach and scheduled our first official meeting with our company liaison.

Our first draft for our team’s logo.

That’s it for Stratagem’s first week. We’re just getting started!