Second Monthly Blog

Plan cannot keep up with changes

😱 Uncertainty of interview schedule

When we finished the first phase of our project, we immediately began the second phase of the work according to our milestone. Firstly, we read a lot of literature reviews to help us to deeply understand the problems and design the first draft of the interview questions. After many discussions among the team members and the completion of the mentor guidance, we began to discuss the time of the interview with clients by email.

The first time we were looking for the right time of the interview, unfortunately, we didn't get a timely response from our clients. Because Accor was in move their office from Robina to GoldCoat and caught up with the Gold Coast public holiday. So we have to wait for their response patiently.

Until next week, due to the physical condition of the son of the HR manager who is responsible for connecting us, the interview has to be postponed until the next week. And another responsible person provided us with the available interview time for the next week is September 9, 10 and 11. We were anxious in the wait of the panic because the progress of the project has been seriously delayed.

We are exhausted 

Two days later, we received an email from the HR Manager Kelly that after their discussion they did not want to do the survey people as our Employee Opinion Survey commences on 10 September – 15 October, they worried about too many survey's for our teams, given the importance we place on finding out our honest engagement % within their business.

We re-sent our interview questions and explained what we wanted to achieve through interview. But in an email, we received mentioned that these questions are the same as their engagement survey being rolled out at the same time, so they want us to change questions which can direct focus on why people stay verse alternatives. We analyze and compare the previous engagement survey to help us design new interview questions. 

Finally, after the whole changes, we did the interviews in Accor Vacation Club in Gold Coast on Wednesday and Thursday of week 8. Too much time wasted on waiting and changing. Our group needs to hurry and catch up with other groups.

Keeping in mind...

🤯 To do or not to do a survey ?!

At the beginning of the project, client wanted us to design interviews and surveys to analyze call center employee retention rates. The questionnaire was asked not to be designed too long and different from the engagement survey. We made a plan to do the survey first and then design the interview question based on the survey analysis, but the plan was rejected. The advice of client and mentor was to do an interview first and then survey.

Drink coffee and wake up！！

When we redesigned the survey to the client, the client wanted us to postpone the survey and Jo (our mentor) gave us more professional advice to design questionnaire more academic in logical way. However, we were worried that the delay in time would affect our project could not be completed within the specified time. This is because  data analysis is a difficult part which will take up a lot of time. In addition to the data analysis of the questionnaire, we still have a lot of translation and analysis work to be done after the interview.

Change the content of the questionnaire again

Mentor guides us on how to analyze the data

At the last time we confirmed the interview time with clients, clients felt that the survey was still not suitable. Because they were doing other employee surveys inside the company. Moreover, clients thought that our questionnaire is similar to the engagement survey and there is no need for the employee to do a similar one. Jo suggested that we can keep the survey and make recommendations for client's existing survey in our final report based on the experience of my design questionnaire.

Group online meeting

To sum up, this month we were so busy for the interviews and surveys. We are prepared to face a large number of interviewees, but the enthusiasm is impacted by changes in various schedule. We realize that unless the plan is implemented until the last minute, we will never know if there will be other changes. The mentality is crucial at this time, be sure to prepare for Plan B, Plan C or even Plan D!!