A bittersweet ending
By Victoria
I had come into this project anxious about what I could contribute to our client, who is an internationally recognized organization that is lauded for the work they do across the globe. I had underestimated the value in sharing passion, willingness to learn, and, most importantly, time.
This morning, at 8:30am, we held our last meeting with our client. The last month has been both unusually busy and incredibly rewarding as we molded the final deliverable to present to our client. While I will not miss the bi-monthly 8:00am meetings (I am not at my sharpest in the morning), I will genuinely miss our client’s warm enthusiasm and passion for our project.
We ultimately presented our client with a report on the main barriers to financial literacy in Moldova, the country in which our client is based, as well as short, medium, and long-term suggestions to both address the situation immediately while planning for a sustainable solution for the future.
At the beginning of this semester, I had anticipated that we would have a more concrete suggestion with details all fleshed out and specific steps for our client to take. However, as we delved more deeply into this project, it became clear to me that we could not provide a step-by-step approach to our client’s problem. Furthermore, that would not help our client in the long run. Through our research, we were able to determine several specific barriers that were affecting Moldovan women’s financial literacy. Once we determined the barriers, we were able to re-examine the case studies we highlighted in our interim report to show how other programs across the globe were able to address the same or similar barriers. Finally, we were able to examine possible partnerships that would allow our client to tackle these barriers while staying aligned with their mission and meeting their own goals. Exploring the issue from these lenses allowed us to bring more value to our client and helped us show them how to consider possible approaches, problems, and partnerships in a way that may benefit them in the future. In the end, this brought much more value to our client.
Our client was so excited for our final presentation that she invited several members of her team to attend our final presentation. I was incredibly nervous to present to this group as these women are in roles and doing work that I aspire to do one day. In short, they are “what I want to be when I grow up”. It felt strange presenting them with research and statistics about their country, and while I knew our suggestions were based on sound evidence and research, I could not really gauge the room to understand how they felt about our findings and suggestions. I was pleasantly surprised when we were met with pure enthusiasm, questions, and gratitude for presenting our work. I had worried that we had not given them enough, but they were thrilled that we had been able to do this work for them so that they could use the research as they make their next steps.
Looking back, I would have suggested we invite our client’s colleagues sooner as it was clear that they were excited about next steps for the project. If we had engaged them earlier, we could have taken their questions, thoughts, and considerations into account in the second half of our project. As it stands, they were all so thankful that we were interested in working on this project and they were appreciative and excited about the work we did and the findings we presented.
In the last month, our client had picked up steam on another aspect of this project and a lot of different pieces were coming together for them: we presented our research, they are conducting a needs assessment and rolling out a pilot financial literacy course, and they have possible partners who are interested in working with them. Serendipitously, our client came to the same conclusion we did: in the long term, it would be beneficial for our client to partner with a startup fintech company to help make financial literacy knowledge and products easily accessible for Moldovan women. Knowing that we both reached the same conclusion made me feel even more confident in our deliverable and research for our client.
I had come into this project anxious about what I could contribute to our client, who is an internationally recognized organization that is lauded for the work they do across the globe. I had underestimated the value in sharing passion, willingness to learn, and, most importantly, time. Ultimately, our research and suggestions will be a good steppingstone for our client as they move forward with their project, and I am looking forward to seeing what they do next. This was a perfect way to complete my last semester at Questrom and I am thankful that I was able to participate in this project.