Question: If you could go back to one of your projects and change something about it what would it be and why!???? :)

Catherine Conaghan answered on 20 Nov 2014:

At the end of every project we put together a document called “Lessons Learned” and get input from everyone involved on what we have learned and what should be done differently the next time. Without fail these documents always have several pages in them – no project is ever perfect, and there is always something that you could have improved on.

For example – the last project we just finished up was testing our software on different schools to then simulate energy measures on-line, so the schools could calculate the savings they could achieve before they actually spent any money on making a change e.g. they could test different energy efficient lights on the on-line model to see what the best savings would be, before actually replacing the lights. For us to have a model that can do this we need a lot of information about the buildings – walls, windows, when lights are on, when people are in it, when windows are open etc. The major problem we had on this project was a lack of data. Next time we would make sure that the schools chosen to test this have high levels of information on the building. We also created a standard list of basic required info for different building types for creating models, so we know from the start how accurate the models can be.