The importance of taking time in the upfront
By Lauren
As we’ve moved ahead on our project it’s been exciting to see the relationship and trust we’ve developed with our client. In my last blog post, I reflected on the importance of taking the time to get to know the team you are working with before diving immediately into project topics. I’ve been encouraged to see how making this change has moved us forward as a team and made our conversations much more productive and impactful.
When assessing the progress of our project, I’m energized by the progress we’ve made on research in the space, while continuing to map out our overall goals for the next phase of our project. In the beginning of the project, there were many times when I felt very overwhelmed at the task ahead of us. Guidance from my teammate and from Professor Flammer helped me to take a step back and understand that it was not expected, nor wise, to try and complete a project of this scope for the midterm presentation. The midterm check in is designed to focus on the research conducted on the topic to help inform the final deliverable. With this advice in mind, our team scheduled various calls to learn more about incubators, nonprofit management, and volunteer engagement. We worked with other teams from class to attend valuable calls with partners who helped to direct us to different research resources and social impact fundamentals that we included in our midterm presentation.
Upon reflection, this project has shown me the importance of patience when developing a long-term strategy. This class is designed with the goal to truly help the organization we are working for.
There have been many times in my past working experience where our team had been rushed to develop strategies without sufficient time to do the background research required to come up with the best solution for the long-term. While there will always be a need to work efficiently, our project up to this point has shown me the advantage of prioritizing upfront due diligence when creating a long-term strategy.
Another point of reflection I’ve had during this process was the importance of pushing back and truly creating a partnership in a client-consultant relationship.
As mentioned previously, our project scope has evolved over the first half of the class to better focus on supporting the organization to create sustainable internal strategies that will support their growth. During our midterm presentation, our client inquired about the original scope of work and wanted to understand if we were planning to continue that workstream as well. In this moment we took the opportunity to discuss our point of view on why we believed our emphasis should stay on the newly revised scope. The client was aligned with our thinking which reaffirmed that we are on the right track and pushed us further in our project. This moment showed me the importance of having a partnership where we felt confident to speak up and push back on direction we didn’t agree with. We are excited to move forward and work on the final deliverable for our client which will hopefully make an impact on their organization!