Third Monthly Blog

Flustered but Perfect Ending ❤️

😣 Crazily modify report

Because the interview analysis need more time, we did not give the entire report draft to our mentor(Jo) for the first time. We have only submitted a literature review draft that has been completed and hope to get more advice from Jo. It can be said that Jo really attentively suggested that the content literature review should have a wider range of data and a more logical layout. Only for this part, we modified it more than eight times!! From then on, we started the process of crazily modifying the report.

· Classification of post-it notes
This is first time we use analysis method: affinity diagramming. None of us can image that how huge task it is. Jo personally taught us how to classify these post-it notes according to different types. Her help makes the content of our report more academic and persuasive. You cannot believe that we spent 10 hours in the library to complete this task! This is really exhausting, because the interview analysis written in the previous report draft needs to be re-edited a lot. For each part to be logically linked, we have had three meetings during the mid-break holiday. We have to subdivide the content of the research part, and each person writes according to the different items of the affinity diagramming that has already been done.

Making affinity diagramming

High level affinity diagram of the interview results

By the time the final report was completed, we could not remember how many times it was modified. We only remember that this period really made people collapse, just want to end as soon as possible. But it must be acknowledged that, with many times modifications, our report is very logical and every subtitle is well-founded.

 

Final report

😭We are delayed! Why?!

We have a bad communication with our client. The original idea from clients is to conduct 40 interviews, which is impossible to achieve. So we believe questionnaire plus interview is the best way to find out the reasons and we spent a lot of time to design the questionnaire and interview protocol. But the client eventually said no to questionnaire, because they conducted an engagement survey at the same time. Unfortunately, time flies.

Second, bad time management, something unexpected happened, we send out email on Thursday, but Friday is the public holiday in gold coast, we didn't know that. And then, the client's poor son was sick. We didn't have a plan B at that time. Again, a week passed. Moreover, in order to save client's time, we finally plan to have two teams do presentation on the same day because both of us do the AVC's project.

👏What a GREAT TEAM!

Although we delayed the presentation, it did not make us feel like we had enough time. This is because we only have two days left to see the clients when we receive the final revision feedback from the mentor. The team member who in charge of the presentation has been highly nervous practiced over and over again before meeting with the clients. 

During the presentation

We never expected Kelly (our client) to be very satisfied with our results! She affirmed our results and said that the reason of high employee turnover rate we analyzed was roughly the same as they expected. The affinity diagramming method we used is exactly what they are currently using. Even our recommendations to address high employee turnover rates match the strategies they are considering! Mentors also praised our project. They thought that it was hard for us to complete the interview and analyze these interviews in a limited time, but we did it. We also surprised Jo by completing the affinity diagramming in a short period of time. Overall, our project has finally ended successfully.

 

The new AVC call centre

❤️ What we learn 

In this project, on the one hand, we learned lots of research skills. We learned how to conduct interviews, we are strangers to interviewees, how can we get more information from them, what do their body language mean. In addition, we learned a brand-new analysis skill, affinity diagramming, to analysis qualitative data.

Moreover, through this delayed experience, We have become much more aware of the need to communicate regularly with clients and team members to see if we are on the right track. And always have a plan B. At university we just complete assignments, if we don't perform well we only receive poor marks. But in future, poor performance might lead to a loss of money and reputation for the company.

We are very glade to have the opportunity to work with Accor Vacation Club and very happy to finish this project perfectly with Jo's help and team member's collaboration!! Well done guys!!