Report writing and document composition

¶ … Host Organization

During any internship problems are to be expected so the learning process may take place. One problem I encountered with the host is that they sometimes left the task completely up to us with the hope that we can solve everything ourselves without further guidance. Despite this great opportunity to take the job as our own and as a real working experience, most interns were not familiar with the correct procedures and became afraid of doing something wrong. Sometimes the host would surprise us and ask tough questions. Often we felt reluctant to ask questions due to our ignorance. This problem occured during the RRA event where we were required to send emails to all of the merchants. The host didn't gave us any email accounts to send those emails, thus we was wondering if we should use their official email account or make an new email account self and asked the advice from the host. However, the host merely replied "what do you think, is there any difference?" This was not the answer we were looking for. Thus, we created Hotmail accounts, sent and communicated with those 200 merchants via the Hotmail account. However some days after we got indication from a concern staff member we were told that we needed to stop all the working process because the emails we sent were unofficial and appeared unprofessional.

After attending a meeting about this problem, we received a new directive to use the official accounts and that we needed to resend the emails to the merchants from the new account again. Not only was this extremely inconvenient to all the team members, but this also delayed our normal working schedule on all of the other work tasks allocated to all of us interns.

Problems also arose with the attitudes of some interns as well. Sometimes the interns would hold a different opinion from the organization's standard approach causing some confusion on how to behave. Regardless, we were expected to toe the company line and agree with their ideas. Thus problems would arise if we should follow their rules even though we thought they may have been problematic. For example, we suggested placing our promotional material in different shops in order to cover more geographic locations and asked for permission to do this in advance. However we were told by the host to just put the material inside the shop without any permission. We felt doing this was both unethical and resulted in wasting material because most of the managers will see the promotional material and throw it away once they saw it.

Lacking of Software Skills

Many of the tasks we carried out were related to design, which required competence in many different types of software. Sometimes, we planned an effective design, however we finished with a slightly different version. This was due to incompetence in particular software such as Flash. For example, we originally planned to incorporate animation effects into the Xmas E-card, however due to the technical problem, the animated flash E-card was rejected by the host.

Lack of Resources and Personnel

The project involved big events, such as the Red Ribbon Angel event and charity walk which demanded numerous helper and resources in order to make the event succeed. However, a lack of manpower and resources resulted in reduced quality for the event. For example, in handing out the event guide. This task required many people in order to distribute to a wider geographic location. However with only 5 people, the places we were able to reach were greatly reduced. Also when It came to the street promotion, we originally planned to design an eye catching t-shirt in order to catch people's attention, however due to the limited budget, this suggestion was refused.

2) Suggest ways in which you would improve your project from a group perspective.

The most important thing we needed to improve in order to raise the overall project quality is to develop effective team communication skills among the members. I believe things would be improved significantly if everybody paid the same effort and did the tasks as planned.

It is important that every team member understands and shares important information. Teamwork was missing during this event and most if it was lost due to the inability of people to comfortably communicate with each other. Roles and responsibilities were often overlooked or just ignored due to this communication problem.

In order to fix this, a new organizational plan would be needed. Meetings should be regularly scheduled so part time jobs and other distracting activities would be kept at a minimum. Every team member must be informed of the latest project updates or project issues in order to successfully communicate.

Another way to help would be to clearly define the roles and responsibility of every team member to avoid confusion or unnecessary re-work. Solutions should also include asking for feedback and suggestions from other team members. Feedback would have helped the design work where we would have consulted all team members' opinions first, generating more creative ideas from all members of the team.

Another way to make thinks helpful would be to maximize our current resources. It would have been better to make appropriate use of emails, telephones, voice messages and instant messengers and try to contact each member individually when having some important message, especially in the tasks of assigning of work and important reminders.

Problem resolution skills also needed to be improved as well. Many times silent responses amongst various team members exacerbated the situation and made things worse. Grudges soon developed and it became a very uncomfortable situation to work in. I learned that is very important to know how to argue and disagree with people without hurting their feelings or causing more problems. This skill seems to be very useful in negotiation within teams.

More Manpower

We could improve our lack of manpower by inviting our classmates or friends to participate. Social media may have helped as well. By opening a facebook page for volunteer recruitment and providing a small gift or free party to the volunteer as a reward for their support. For the problem of limited resources, we could improve by asking friends or ourselves for things we don't have use for. For example we can gather our old T-shirt and print on it by self, in order to reduce the printing and T-shirt fees.