Reflective Report

This assignment is an opportunity for you to reflect on the practical application of the knowledge gained during the consultancy project process. It will also prompt you to reflect on project management, teamwork, online collaboration and leadership, the processes by which the goals of the project were achieved, and future personal development needs you have identified.

You must identify and provide a critical reflection of both the areas in which the project was successful (identifying the key factors which contributed to that success) and the areas which were unsuccessful (identifying key issues and suggesting alternative courses of action which would have improved project delivery). The purpose of the report is to enable you to reflect on the process that was followed during the delivery of the project and to identify key learning points for your future development.

The report will need to be of high quality, utilising the normal referencing and presentation conventions. You will need to support your discussion with documentary evidence of the stages of your project that should be included within your appendix.

Your Task

Produce a 3000-word report reflecting on what you have learned during the management of the Company Consultancy Project within two key areas.

1) Project Management

Consider the theories, models and approaches that you have been introduced to in this module (and throughout your year of study at NBS) and reflect on their relevance to this project. If parts of your project were not completed on time was it due to poor time management or inaccurate estimating? Did you find the project went off track? Was this due to a lack of planning or ineffective team working? What role did you and other members play in organising and structuring the work of the team? How well did you manage the geographical distance between group members? What types of communication tools did you use and what were the strengths and weaknesses of each of these? How was it different managing an online project to working face to face? Did you create an effective Gantt chart and update this during the project?

2) Team working and leadership

You will have been working in a cross-cultural team with people from a diverse range of cultures who have different personalities and approaches to work. From establishing your team with a set of rules and roles to help set the team up, to beginning work on the project, progressing through the project and then coming to project completion, the roles that

team members have played may have shifted. What did you do to steer your team, motivate others, help ideas generation or encourage harmony within your team? What did you do to establish rapport in an online context? What did you learn about working with a cross-cultural team and what did you learn about how to get the most out of each team member? In addition, if relevant, what did you learn about team working online and what recommendations would you make to others about how to handle remote working? Did particular people take on a leadership role? What leadership styles did they employ? You will need to utilise concepts from theory in relation to leadership, remote and face to face team working and the impact of culture on business to help frame your discussion.

When reflecting on these two key areas consider both the performance of the team as a whole and you as an individual. During the course of your project you will be holding meetings to review progress, plan work and develop ideas; you need to illustrate this process by including key documents produced within your appendix and refer to these in your discussion. These could include for example: minutes of meetings, project plans, draft research tools developed, snippets from online discussions, communications sent to the team or your client, team rules established and any other artefact that helps illustrate the points you discuss.

After reflecting on these two key areas you then need to consider the lessons that can be learned from this project to help improve your performance for delivery of future projects and to guide your future personal development. These lessons should form the main emphasis of your conclusions. Thinking about the next stage of your career, you then need to draw recommendations in the form of a personal development plan to help take your learning from this module forwards.