LAST BLOG POST

Good morning everyone, and an even better morning as this is our last blog post of the semester!

 

Twelve weeks of blog posts later, and I am amazed to look back and reflect on how far my reflections have come - and I bet I am not alone! It's fascinating to see where I imagined this project would go when we began week one, and where it is actually wrapping up within the next  1-2 weeks. It's all rooted back in a reflection I had a few weeks ago, about being flexible but also maintaining a big picture vision for where the project is going.

 

One large learning that I've had throughout the semester is the ability to maintain and achieve specific goals and objectives. While all of our clients have been explicit in their approval of our work, it is still interesting to see what parts of our deliverables we had to cut out or change so that we could execute to the best of our abilities on others. This is far from a knock on our ability to execute, time manage, or perform, but more of a learning opportunity to maintain open communication lines about progress with your client so that they truly understand what you are delivering and why it matters to their business that extra time be spent on it.

 

For example, the Business of Fashion academic research is going incredibly well, but has evolved from including interviews and a breadth of resources to diving deep into two specific areas: a core competency analysis and a competitive matrix framework. Indeed, Katie and I could have just done these two modules and "checked a box" to deliver it to our client, but the more we dove into the actual research, the more we found that there are more insights to be learned from that specific module that we had initially anticipated. Thanks to the incredible flexibility of our clients, they've been excited to trust us in our journey and our ability to deliver a final project that will positively impact their business.

 

The next few weeks will look a little crazy for Katie and I, but nonetheless represent the culmination of our hard work executed to the best of our ability. As I prepare to spend the net few hours dividing into a competitive class matrix of course topics, I'm eager to continue to pull insights from the depth of our work.