Final Major Project Evaluation

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In Contrast to the marketing department, there were some departments who I felt were not paticulalarly pro-active. The finance department, I feel was a prime example of this. During the weekly meetings, we discussed progress made on targets set in previous meetings and set of new actions. To make the actions available for referral at any time, they were emailed to everyone each week. However departments such as the finance team would sometimes forget to fulfil their actions at each meeting, leading to many actions being acted upon weeks late, therefore was slowing the project’s progress. Although I feel such things were mainly due to lack of organisation within many departments, I also feel there were things that the project directors, could have done to counter-act this. I think that perhaps the reason why some departments failed to act upon actions is because they failed to check them. Regardless of whether they were aware of what needed to be done for the following meeting none could be bothered to check them, I think people would have acted upon actions more if we had presented them in a different way. If I was to do the project again, I would make sure that after each meeting, we made a print out of all the actions for everyone in the group because I think that everyone would have greater awareness of the actions and would respond more pro-actively to this more direct sending of information.

In this project, core of all discussion, co-operation and direction, occurred within the weekly project meetings. It was overall everyone’s responsibility to attend these meetings; which involved keeping order and making sure everyone’s view was heard and structuring the meeting; which involved writing an agenda beforehand from the project directiors, detailing what needed to be discussed. As a whole, I think these meetings had many short-comings. In the meetings, debates between various project members became very heated and in-depth, causing discussion to deviate from the intended agenda and made it hard and socially intimidating for some project members to voice their opinion. This I think was a major issue because it was highly important, due to the co-operative nature of the project, that everyone was able to comfortably voice their opinion without a feel of intimidation. If I was to repeat the project, I would make sure I help kept a greater level of order in the meetings by ensuring that there was strictly no talking while someone else was and that people could only talk if given permission by a director to allow flows of conversation and order. Additionally to try and maintain structure, I think that it would be wise to limit the amount of time spent discussing each point in the agenda. I think this because in the meetings, some important points had to be rushed or brushed aside because we had spent too much time spent discussing particular points at the beginning of the meeting for a long period of weeks.