How my perception of Project Management work has changed since I started my internship

    At the start of the internship, I was confused about what to expect from the Project Management curriculum because it was a Computer Science field that was new to me. Although I had worked on a couple of individual and group projects, I had never gone through a detailed product life cycle.  From defining a problem statement, developing personas for the problem statement, conducting user ability studies, brainstorming viable solutions to the problem identified, developing product walkthroughs, and then developing a minimum viable product. At the start of the internship, I wondered why we had to go through this entire process, yet we could spend more time thinking about developing a web application.

     However, with time I am appreciating the efforts we put in to the project Management curriculum 

because it is useless to develop a product for a target audience that you have not analyzed to know what product would best solve the challenges they are facing. The daily meetings with our team PM coaches also greatly helped elaborate on how the different PM steps we were taking would relate to the final project. This week as we worked on our product specification, which is a combination of all our findings throughout the project management phase, I was why we were developing our web application and what engineering requirements we needed to implement our solution.

    It has been a journey, from not knowing much about Project management and agile development to appreciating the impact of spending time in the project Management phase before engineering a product. The more quality time we invested in the project management phase, the more relevant the engineering solution is to the problem being addressed.