1. NEED ONE COMMENT 150 WORDS WORTH IT ON THE BELOW POST.

My group was very frustrated with the simulation this week. For our first try, we did our best to stick as close to the budget as possible and listen to the employees moods. However, during this attempt, we noticed the team's morale and stress level would not always correlate with their mood. Their moods were causing us to constantly change aspects of our team to tend to their needs. However, it seemed as though we would give them what they want, like more help, and then the next week it seemed we gave too many meetings. We almost felt like they were never going to be happy and we should stop making as many changes. We felt like what was working on our last simulation was not helping in this simulation so we continued to try new things for each of our attempts. We also noticed, while making our decisions, the bottom of the screen would give an estimate of how many tasks we would complete that week and our completion week. However, whenever we ran the week the results would not add up. For example, it would say we completed 20 tasks, but our total number of tasks only increased by 12 from the previous week. This left us very confused after our first attempt. We became frustrated because we would use that information to come up with strategies and it gave us false information that overall put us behind schedule. We decided to start the second simulation with the max amount of workers to get a head start on the schedule. Just like in the first attempt, the team members would not finish the predicted amount of tasks it claimed it would. We tried this for 2 weeks until cutting workers because this left us extremely over budget with little room to turn around. Our original idea in using this strategy was to finish ahead of schedule so we stay within the budget. We ended up losing all but 4 workers and decided at that point to just keep things the same. We noticed the team's mood was finally staying confident when we stopped making changes due to the recommendations and prior mood of the team. We thought making changes would make things worse. Next simulation I feel like we should keep a steady team throughout the whole simulation with higher skills. I feel like this way their mood will stay confident and less confused, resulting in more tasks being completed per week. It seemed as though our team's morale stayed steady when there was less hiring being done. We also tried to stay consistent with our meetings in hopes of long-term improvement. As for outsourcing, we tried to enforce it so we could stick closer to the budget. However, the team would be immediately confused by too much outsourcing. However, if we noticed our morale was still high we kept it around some primary tasks or extensive. I would definitely say we struggle the most in staying under budget. The budget only allows 3 workers, give or take depending on skill level, to remain on budget. This made it difficult to get the workers to complete enough tasks per week. The only way we saw improvement was by keeping their skill level high but that already adds enough added costs as it is.

2. NEED ONE COMMENT 150 WORDS WORTH IT ON THE BELOW POST..

We enjoy getting to experiment with the different and see the direct effects they have and understanding how the bigger the project, the more problems and risks there are. We liked the addition of competition from another company in this simulation as it is a real issue faced in project management and we had to learn how to deal with it while keeping on schedule and under budget. We found the settings involving the team members and their skill level the most useful when dealing with risk as well as outsourcing. When we had more problems/higher risk, we raised the skill level of the team members and lowered our level of outsourcing in order to better address the problems found and any confusion within the team. Risk greatly affected team morale and made the team members feel upset and confused. As the risk got higher, morale dropped lower and very little got done. This drop in morale also led to higher stress levels for the team members and it was difficult to keep morale up. At first, we kept outsourcing to a lower level to keep the team confident and prevent confusion and low morale. When morale started dropping, we started adding more of each of the different kinds of meetings according to how the team members felt and that did help boost their morale, or at the very least, keep it the same level. Unfortunately, we were unable to keep morale at 85% due to the problems that arose and the loss of team members to another company. When the risk was presented, our team felt that adding certain settings according to what recommendations we were getting would help with the overall simulation. For example, when we were having too many problems then we would add meetings to help resolve the problems. Yes, we used outsourcing for a few weeks. It affected team morale by making the team feel frustrated in terms of their work. For example, when we outsourced extensively, the team felt that the project was confusing because things were being outsourced and they werent working on it themselves. We felt that having more meetings in the first simulation helped with keeping the team feeling good about their work. For example, increasing some of the one-on-one coaching and standups helped the workers feel that they were being heard with their problems. We found that when the teams morale or stress levels were considered poor, they achieved fewer tasks per week. When they felt supported and confident in their abilities, or understood what needed to be done, they completed more tasks per week. The main challenge was meeting all three! In both attempts, our team was unable to meet all three goals. In our first attempt, we prioritized the schedule and budget on the second. The budget felt too small to properly staff the team, and the schedule felt too short to properly support the team with meetings. We set up regular stand-up meetings with the idea that every day should begin with a 15-minute meeting. We experimented with the number of status reviews and coaching meetings based on the teams feedback. At a minimum, we tried to have 5 stand-ups, one coaching, and one status review. They had a great impact on our goals largely in terms of scheduling because the more meetings the team needed, the fewer tasks they were able to complete. On the other hand, the fewer meetings, the lower morale, and higher stress levels were.