Plan Well before Your Start Working

  For what Lanh had said, I cannot agree more because it is just like that the idea is your blueprint of building and the techniques you master now is the base of your building. How can the building be if you cannot build a reliable base even you have a great blueprint? Then, for the question that whether the idea is important or the execution is important, I have to say this should not be a question because obviously both are important because a good application is always with a good innovation idea and well-handled execution. These two points happen in different phases of application development and they should be given enough attention in each phase.

  For Facebook, what I want to say is the success it has done recently for the transfer of technical focus from HTML5 to native mobile apps. No matter whether this decision is correct or not, the improvements of the performance are quite obviously and falling condition of its share price has been reversed. This gives us a convictive lesson on how should we make good decisions in proper time.

  For Another life, actually this idea went to the wrong way at the very beginning because the team came up with this idea even without seriously thinking clearly about the logic flow and values users can gain from. For fan Gang, actually it is not a bad idea to start from because the logic and usage of this idea is quite clear and straightforward.

  For the decision of whether change project idea or not in the mid-way, my opinion is that the general cost of both decisions should be measured and considered according to the remaining time firstly. In this phase, since the original idea was almost impossible to be well implemented on time, the team should decisively make the decision early to change to measurable ideas.

  After reading through the whole case, in my point of view, there are two major problems for the team. First, they did not evaluate the time required for developing the whole application in the early stage of their project. Second, they kept planning for too many features for each idea they chose to work on without clear understanding of the core features of each. For non-obvious problem, they lacked a decisive decision maker with clear understanding about the whole working logic of each idea.

  They actively met up to discuss about what problems would be faced and gained feedbacks from others. These were what they did well.

  If I was Jeremy on the evening of 24^th April, I will try my best to call for all my members lastly to cut down all unnecessary components of our applications to ensure the core functions at least work in some extent. Otherwise, I had to tell Dr. Colin about the situations of my group and waited for his suggestions.

  If one of me team members is unable to deliver, the whole working plan may be changed to be a bit tightly. Besides, I should ask for each member about any further issues they may face in the future which will probably affect the progress of our project and plan well based on these details.

  The key point I learn from the case study is: Plan well before your start working. This is actually a quite common sense but it is always ignored when we start an exciting project. Here planning well does not mean to consider every detail. This will lose the flexibility and probably be useless as things always change as time goes on. Instead of caring much about details, the most important things are the clear logic and understanding of project idea and the techniques and time cost evaluation. These points are the fundamental factors for the application development. If they are not carefully considered firstly, probably what happened to Jeremy will happen for you.