We just finished our presentation about an hour ago, so I've been reflecting on the past 3 to 4 months. Overall, this was a very positive experience. It was a nice change from the banking industry that I am used to. If I had any advice or words or wisdom for future students, I'd say to be sure you manage your time wisely. Because our team worked on tasks each week, we never felt panicked at the end. We also built time into our schedule for any issues that arose. We experienced delays in the research phase so thankfully we... Continue reading

Our team presents one week from today and I'm actually feeling very good about it. I think we are just about ready. We did send our presentation to Drew for feedback and he offered some very good advice about the logo we created. Other than that, I think he just reaffirmed our feelings that we are on the right track so we can finish this thing up. I was excited about this capstone from the start and I thought I could handle it easily because I balance many projects as part of my job. I'd be lying if I said... Continue reading

Our team made a big dent in putting together the final presentation this week. We have every section complete with the exception of the recommendations. Tomorrow we are going to get together and put our recommendations into the report. At that point we will pull everything from the report into a presentation deck. We also connected with Jordan at LPK to put together visual representations of our concepts. Lots of good movement over the last week and we confirmed our presentation date as April 18th, 2016. Continue reading

I feel really good about where the team and I are with our project. We have started the report of our analysis and conceptualizing our recommendations. Drew has also been able to connect us to some resources who may be able to put together tangible concept examples and not just an idea on paper. I wish I had more to write but I really just feel good about where we stand right now. That changes weekly but this week I am feeling organized and confident. By this time next week we should be starting to pull from our report to... Continue reading

The team met on Sunday to prep for our 2nd project review with Drew. I think we were unclear of how far along in the process we should be and what would be deemed as "acceptable" at this stage of the project. After talking about it, we all feel we are on right on track. Our research is complete and we are in the process of performing the analysis. Next step is to begin putting together the report with all of our artifacts. Our biggest struggle is figuring out how realistic and granular we need to go with the recommendations... Continue reading

This past week was successful. We have 72 responses to our survey which is 72 more than we had at this time last week. We are still trying to figure out places to tap into to get more responses for analysis. At this point, I think we are starting to feel like we need to begin putting the presentation together, at least in a rough draft, but we have heard conflicting things on what that entails. Some have said a paper is included but others have said it's just this full powerpoint presentation of the process, results, analysis and recommendations.... Continue reading

Last week was interesting and progress was made so I'm very excited! I think my team and I were feeling a bit like we were running in place before class last Monday. During class we used a SIT technique (task unification) and came up with different ideas on how to actually get people to participate in our research. One of our best was to take our full survey, abbreviate it with the most critical questions, and then partner with Night Ride to have students fill out the responses as Night Ride drives them home or to their location. We also... Continue reading

I have voiced my concern with my group that I feel like things should be moving faster and they have done a great job of keeping perspective. For our project, formulating the research approach and then conducting the research is one of, if not our most, time and labor intensive tasks. Once we get through this, it's putting it all together and putting the recommendations into a visual example which is fun and exciting. I find myself second guessing why we didn't opt for a survey because I feel like we'd be having a much easier time getting participation. Instead,... Continue reading

I have settled down with my frustration from earlier this week. I realized things are moving at an acceptable pace and I just need to relax a little bit. Thankfully my team and I met with Drew via Skype earlier this week to review our Market Research Plan and Focus Group Guide. It was incredibly helpful. We had gone down the path of trying to create the education pieces that go with the campaign we will recommend when truly that isn't in our scope. We aren't psychologists who should be researching the cues that people give off to signal they're... Continue reading

This week has been tough for me. I find the beginning of a project to be the most intimidating and overwhelming. Part of my job as a project manager is to mobilize things and get things moving on large scale initiatives and I am usually pretty successful. This helps me quickly overcome the intimidation factor. What I am finding with our capstone so far is that I'm not having as much success overcoming the intimidation because things aren't moving as quickly as I would like. Ideally I'd have liked to already be started with our focus group sessions but it... Continue reading

Our team had the first project review with Drew this morning. It was pretty eye opening. We spent over 2 hours yesterday fine-tuning a survey that we thought we would deploy this week but after speaking with Drew I realized we had zoned in on a survey as our only market research option and sort of developed tunnel vision. With a sensitive topic like ours (sexual assault) it is probably wiser to do focus groups where we can leverage face to face interaction and use scenario type questions to identify the cues that women give off to men when they... Continue reading