During the past week, each individual compiled the research designated to them and wrote up their portion of the report.  Sunday night, the team came together and compiled each member’s research into the midterm report, set the formatting of the paper, completed the in-text citations and bibliography information, and submitted.  The external search is now largely done, however as we move into the internal search and formulating different solutions, we predict that we will be forced to find and add additional information to cover aspects of the problem we didn’t initially view as being necessary.

Today in class, we began thinking about potential solutions to the problem and debated what directions  we need take in terms of whether or not certain solutions are feasible.  We began creating spreadsheets to compare cost information and gathered more research pertaining to the amounts of certain types of freight that are shipped into Philadelphia (since we are modeling Pittsdelphia largely off of Philadelphia).

Today the team developed their customer need and problem definition. We got our objectives and constraints for the project down and broke down research goals. We also determined a relative order of customer needs.

Today the group finished organizing our thoughts on what our timeline looks like for the remainder of the semester.  We created our work breakdown structure, design structure matrix and Gantt chart.  We also collected a large amount of online research papers that will be very beneficial to our research moving forward.  Overall, today was very effective in getting a better feel for what our time constraints will be moving forward.

During this meeting we established what work needs to be done when. We started our Project Management Workbook and greatly improved our website. We now have a calendar with major due dates, as well as a Design Structure Matrix for more specific work such as specific research topic. We also distributed that research amongst the different members of our group.