February 1st (Udacity Lectures 4-6)
This is a late blog posting.
Are my challenges this week allowed to be personal? I'm not typically the type of person who allows my personal life to affect my work, but that has unfortunately been the case this week. However, I guess you could say my personal challenges actually add something to my group's challenges this week, so I'm going to role with it....
The Challenege....I think my group's main challenge this week is the ever present question in everyone's life, everyday "Where the heck do I go from here?". We've received financial information from our client, and have also heard from our EIR. The issue is we all feel quite stuck looking at the financial information and our EIR who we were hoping would be able to help us with deciphering it, can't meet us for several weeks due to her very busy schedule (blogger's note: she sounds awesome, I am really excited to meet and talk to her). So where do we go from here? This is where our epiphany comes in...
The Epiphany... While watching our Udacity lectures this week (and dealing with life) the thought that a customer relationship is a two way street really resonated with me. Although we won't be able to meet with our EIR for several weeks, there is a lot we can already do to improve our relationship with her prior to our meeting. We have to be able to offer her something that she needs from us.
The Execution....In this case, for our EIR and for our client, we really must strive to work on what we can be giving them instead of only thinking about what we need from them. So, we need to do our due diligence in trying to figure out the financials as best we can on our own (Hello, old financial management textbooks, hoped I would never meet you again), as well as research other like-minded organizations and check out not only their business models, but their financial statements (Non-profit's statements are usually available online, thank goodness!). There is a lot of work we can do to prepare for the day when we actually meet our EIR so that we have something meaningful to contribute to our relationship.
The Result...We now know "where the heck to go" from here, so that's something. The result is our group feeling a little more relaxed and beginning to plan how the next few weeks will actually turn out for us. I truly think our group is capable of completing a really fantastic project for our client over this semester! No one said it would be easy, that's not why we are here.