Week 2 Tuesday

Good Day,

First, my apologies for the delayed post today. Tuesday's message should have posted automatically at 12:01 a.m. I'll have to poke around in the blogging app to see what I did wrong.

Second, let's talk about the group project...

International Project Groups are available now

You have been assigned to a group for the international project. Each team has a discussion space and a chat room. I've also set up a separate thread just for Project Managers. 

Again, the best advice I can give you for getting this project off the ground is to make sure you have a handle on what the project is asking you to do, and then appoint a project manager.


What the project is asking you to do...

If you haven't finished reading the Business Faux Pas case, you should do that before you start working on the International Project. As you know, the Faux Pas case involves the story of an American executive and his assistant who travel to France for an important business meeting, unintentionally act like jerks and offend their French hosts, and jeopardize their business deal.

The International Project asks you to help Bellcom solve their problem: They clearly have inadequate preparation of their employees who are doing business internationally.

Bellcom has asked you to research London or Sydney, analyze your research, and to prepare a report for them in which you make recommendations about the best way(s) to solve their problem.

The work you do for Bellcom will result in the production of three documents:

1. A Research Design Plan -- this is a detailed memo to your client (the managers at Bellcom) that describes in specific detail what research you will do for them. The RDP serves in many ways as a contract between your team and Bellcom. The research you describe should be the research you actually plan to do. Your research findings will eventually become the foundation of the recommendations you make in the final Recommendation Report.
   
2. A Progress Report -- this is a short memo that you send to me (think me as a senior project manager) that provides a status report on your work on this project as a whole.
   
3. A Recommendation Report (aka the Final Report) -- this is a concise, focused, formal business report in which you make recommendations to Bellcom on the best way to solve their problem, based on the research you have done. As you work on this project, it is important to remember that the RDP and the Recommendation Report are deeply intertwined documents. The RDP is your promise about the work you will do; the Recommendation Report is your delivery on that promise.

How to get the ball rolling...

I know group projects are a pain, group projects in summer are a pain, group projects in an online class in summer are a triple pain. However, I have teams every year that do perfectly good work on this project without ever meeting face to face.

The first thing you need to do is to select a project manager, whose primary (only) contribution to this project is to develop a good understanding of the project and then MANAGES the project.

Once you have a project manager, either the project manager or the group as a whole must articulate your research question. Unlike academic research, where you just start with a topic ("potatoes" for example) and then Google around to see what you can find out, professional consultants are in the business of using research to solve problems. So, you need a research question, something like:

• How can Bellcom avoid a repeat of the French faux pas situation?
• What does Bellcom need to do to prepare employees to do business in London?
• What is the best way to prepare employees for the 2-month trips to London?
• What training do employees need before they leave for the Sydney business trip?

Note: You have quit a bit of flexibility in terms of how long you envision employees staying in your target city. There is in fact quite a bit of difference between preparing people to go for a week or two vs. a few months vs. a semi-permanent move of a year or two. Your team can set the parameters here; just make sure you're all clear on this and that the duration of the stay is addressed in your RDP.

Regardless of the duration you choose, the research you do needs to be 100% focused on solving Bellcom's problem. Does a list of the hottest nightspots or nude beaches help Bellcom solve their problem with clueless employees offending business partners? You're going to have to make that call...

I think teams that are trying to prepare employees for shorter visits to the target cities do a better job of research and problem solving.

A couple of words about collaborative projects

A collaborative project does not mean you all have to meet face-to-face and collaborate on every aspect of the project.

If you work out roles and responsibilities at the outset and put someone in charge of keeping things on track, you can do this without any face-to-face meetings. Defining roles clearly also makes it easier for you to present an argument about your individual contributions to the team effort. Grades for this assignment are assigned individually. I'm perfectly comfortable raising or lowering an individual grade based on their contributions to the project or lack thereof.

If all you need for this class is a passing grade, and you're perfectly content to take a lower grade in exchange for a lesser contribution to the group project, you should establish that fact with your team right now.

If I were doing this project, I'd think about these roles:

• Project Manager: Keeps track of the big picture, what the mission is, who is doing what, schedules, deadlines, and progress. Solves personnel problems. Does NO writing or research.

• Research Design team: A couple of people to plan the research that needs to be done. They should have a good handle on the mission and draft the Research Design Plan.

• Researchers: People who are good at research, but not good at writing, should do the actual research as described on the RDP. The Project Manager in consultation with the RDP team should absolutely feel free to reject research that is sub-standard; not what was asked for; fails to provide information useful in solving the problem. (I'd ask the researchers to submit a bibliography, links to or copies of their actual source material along with a summary of their findings.)

• Recommendations team: A couple of people to develop recommendations based on the research. These people should have a good handle on the problem you're trying to solve and feel comfortable synthesizing the research findings. These people might draft the initial recommendations report.
  
• Document designer: Somebody who is good with MS-Word and document design to take charge of formatting the final drafts of documents, especially the Recommendation Report.
  
• Editors: One or more people to deal with editing at various levels. Substantive editing means taking draft documents and looking at them globally to make sure all of the required content exists, is organized in a way that makes sense, and irrelevant content is eliminated. Copy editing means making surface- and sentence-level edits on final drafts.
  
• Illustrator: Someone who is good with charts/graphs/etc. who will create the visuals you need for the RDP and the Recommendation Report.

We'll talk more in the coming days about the workflow for particular documents. I think for now this is enough (maybe more than enough) information to get you started.

Teams generally have 6 or 7 members, which is more people than I like. You can expect that you'll have some people who either drop the class or just don't show up. Project managers should feel absolutely free to work around these folks. There are lots of little bits that can be parceled out if people show up late in the game.



Have a great day!

Julie