We are reaching the end of the term and close to finishing all of the project sprint goals. In this blog, I would like to take a moment to reflect on the project as a whole. For some context, my project is called VirtuCare and it is a fully immersive exposure of a patient’s mental health disorder. It uses exposure therapy to help the patients navigate through their disorders. It is supposed to help them by slowly exposing them to an environment that amplifies their disorders at low intensity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Honestly my group had multiple big challenges throughout the term. I will talk about 2 of them: the shipment of the oculus and Unity\u2019s documentation. Firstly, we all needed to get our Oculus devices to start building the environment as we needed to make sure it is compatible with a virtual reality headset, yet none of us received our oculus until the end of week 4. Then when we finally started building the environment, I realized that Unity\u2019s documentation on virtual reality\u2019s application is very limited. Furthermore, we all had to mainly rely on the limited resources available on YouTube for Unity. I will admit that both of those challenges were very hard to overcome as they blocked our development\u2019s plan for weeks, however we always tried to do our best with what we have. For example, we overcame the first challenge by building a basic environment that we were certain was compatible with the Oculus, and we left the actual coding and debugging until we got the devices. For the second challenge, we overcame it by meeting constantly and relying on each other to figure out Unity\u2019s development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thinking back, I chose the project as I thought it was the coolest project from the list. I loved psychology and game development, and the project combined both of them into an application. I will admit it met my expectations as I learnt so much about game development, and my meetings with the project manager were very helpful in explaining how psychologically helpful this project can be. However it didn\u2019t always meet my expectations, in the beginning, I felt that the project was not managed very well. I doubted my ability in completing the project and building an application that I am proud of. I think it was managed poorly in the beginning as the project\u2019s scope was extremely large for the amount of time we have. Furthermore, the project manager wasn\u2019t sure of the funding process and the Non-disclosure agreement. All of those made the development plan halt, but I think that if those things were managed better before the project was proposed then the project would have been perfect. Nonetheless, my group and I persevered throughout the terms, and I think we all can say that we are confident in our ability to build this application to help patients all over the world with their mental health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am truly thankful for my team and working with a team for so long taught me a lot. It taught me that in order for a team to accomplish a project, they need to be communicative, respectful, supportive, and most importantly organized. Honestly, if my team wasn\u2019t as communicative and supportive, we wouldn\u2019t have been able to build or accomplish anything. This is because the project itself didn\u2019t feel organized, so we needed to step up and organize it. This couldn\u2019t have happened if we all didn\u2019t continuously communicate new ideas and concepts to organize and build the project. We all were very supportive of the ideas presented and everyone contributed to making the project complete. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
However eventually we needed more organization and guidance on how to break the work requirements and organize the sprint planning. This is where I stepped up and started making the sprint goals more in depth and broke up the work to involve everyone equally. It was hard but it actually taught me that I actually loved being a project manager. I enjoyed creating the sprint goals and stories, then dividing the work among us. I also enjoyed making sure everyone was on board and making progress at all times. I also enjoyed helping unblock everyone whenever they were stuck on something. I didn\u2019t know that I liked being a project manager to that extent(clarification: I mean mini project manager as our actual project manager had no tech knowledge so I need to fill the gaps). I can safely say that I will be pursuing a career in project management when I graduate. I know it can be very hard to find a job in that field, but I plan to use this project as my experience and hopefully I can find a job for project management.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Overall, it was an amazing project that I truly think has the potential to change many lives all over the world. It is initiative and creative for combining game development plus therapy. The main people benefiting from it are patients who wanted to explore treating their disorder through exposure therapy. It is a combination that can give patients access to an application that can treat their disorders in better, easier, and more engaging ways. However none of this could have happened if it wasn\u2019t for my amazing team. They were the most supportive and communicative group of students I worked with. Working with them also taught me that I would like to explore a career in project management. I am definitely most thankful for the career awakening as I felt completely lost in what I wanted to do after graduation but it feels very nice to have a clear plan. I am looking forward to my team\u2019s demonstration of the project and a future career in project management.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We are reaching the end of the term and close to finishing all of the project sprint goals. In this blog, I would like to take a moment to reflect on the project as a whole. For some context, my project is called VirtuCare and it is a fully immersive exposure of a patient’s mental […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/jawad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/jawad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/jawad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/jawad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/jawad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/jawad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/jawad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions\/23"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/jawad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/jawad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/jawad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}