I am going home in the next few weeks. It has been a long year for me and my family. But I still have a lot to tell about my capstone project. First of all, I was very happy to get a project in the industry (banking) that I see myself in the foreseeable future. Secondly my project team has been set up to work directly with Strategy Division and people tell me it is a perfect time for us as the company is making a number of changes to it’s business strategy. So the attention of the company is on us as our achievement is also their achievement. After the kick-off meeting, I felt a little nervous because the company expected us to deliver the most difficult piece of the program that they are working on at the moment. The scope document was done up carefully to ensure that given a limited period of time, we can both deliver what they asked and what we have been asked from an academic perspective. At the time of writing this blog, nothing critical has yet been completed. Only some background information has been documented in the final report. This is because we agreed to file our findings and analysis after each section. I know, a lot of work needs to be completed. The team has done more than six interviews with key personnel in the company. The more information we were given, the more confused we seem to get (at least I thought so). After two days of conducting interviews, I felt really tired. However, we decided to sit down and have a discussion one what should be done next and therefore we spent days in the syndicate rooms (in college) to jot down all our thoughts and came to some conclusions. We have more clarity now.
As the matter of fact, the project team is new to each of us and we have never ever worked together before. The first thing I did was to read the three CVs again. The team dynamics have been good since each of us have different experiences in different industries. I have had a great time working alongside two people with completely different working styles. One team member is very quiet and the other has a very good sense of humour. We were helping each other while learning to deal with the “storming” phase of our project even though it was a very quiet one. For me, it is a totally new experience as I have learned about the other side of business that I have heard but never got my hands on. I have had a chance to talk to experienced people in various positions. One good example of such conversations was when one of the executives from the company asked us “So, what is the final outcome of this project” and “have you used LinkedIn to connect to the people here?” He shared his own insights about networking and job seeking. There are four more weeks to go and regardless of the fact that the workload is likely to get heavier, we are confident that we are on the right track and also have a lot of support from the company. I am looking forward to the final leg of my project!
– Linh Hoang, Full-time MBA 2011-12