Right. So new term, loads of classes, tons of projects and school work, stress from my grandmother's passing, and suddenly this company project starts taking on a life of its own - and in the process taking over my life.
To back up, my new group rocks. Honestly. Team is super cool, people are awesome, and we seem to be close enough to being on the same page. In fact, our team's joke nickname is 'Team Perfect'. We are mostly extroverts, want to do well, and are all loud - with one exception. We need to check ourselves often to make sure we don't get too loud for the one introvert who is awesome and a tremendous core to our team, but we are continuing to meld fairly well.
The company project is one of the core parts of the Trinity MBA - a chance to apply all that we learn in a real-world context by acting as quasi-consultants for an Irish company. The project starts in January and lasts through the end of August - with the report acting as a thesis and being the last deliverable for the MBA. Here's the breakdown of how the project works:
- Stage 1: Industry Analysis (January through mid February) - as a group, we have to define and subsequently analyze the industry in which our assigned company operates by looking at the industry size, key segments and players, trends, profitability, and key success factors for operating in the industry.
- Stage 2: Company Analysis (mid February through April) - analyze our assigned company in-depth - by financial results, operational structure, key products and customers, strengths & weaknesses, etc.
- Stage 3: Issue Identification (May) - after analysis of the industry and company, agree with the company on an issue to analyze and later prepare recommendations for improving/resolving the issue.
- Stage 4: Issue Analysis (June through mid July) - analyze the issue in depth by getting to the root of the problem and identifying where solutions can be applied.
- Stage 5: Recommendations (mid July through August) - outline specific and actionable recommendations for the company to implement.
At each stage of the company project, a 20 minute presentation to a panel of faculty at the business school is made, followed by revisions and then a 20 minute presentation on our findings is delivered to the company. Also, a report on each stage must be prepared and ready by the time the presentation is delivered to the company.
So backing up to where I am time-wise, it's January, and I have a full class load with more assigned reading and projects than the first term. And now we have to identify an industry, write a report on it, and deliver our findings in front of a panel of business school faculty......in our spare time.
Now, because our team is ambitious (and because our director made it known that there is a prize for the best project completed at the end of the year), we were dead set on winning this competition. All efforts turned to working on this project, meaning all the course reading for our actual classes got shelved, with only the necessary bits done to get by week to week. Our group obsessed ourselves with team meetings, reading articles, and trying to get any information we could about our industry. Hell, even deciding what our industry definition was going to be wasn't easy as we tried to come up with something that could be quantified and supported. We also didn't want to fall subject to the classic Coca Cola case when the company looked at its industry too narrowly (soda) and ended up losing market share to the bottled water companies once bottled water took off. We spent hours discussing the industry value chain, doing the classic Porter's 5 Forces analysis, and researching trends. Below is a photo of one afternoon's work on sketching out the industry value chain after hours in the MBA classroom:
As January started drawing to a close, we were working throughout the weekends from 10 til' 6 as a group, and then some of us stayed until midnight or 1am doing more research and work. I never knew it was possible to spend so much time analyzing one industry - but then again I've never had to write a research paper on a particular industry either.
Because this was during the time when my laptop was out of commission, I hardly left our group's office in the business building. It literally became a situation where I routinely left the office between 11pm and 1am to go pass out in my dorm room for a few hours, then get back up around 6:30am to be able to talk to Kevin for a few minutes before getting ready for class and being in my seat for 9am lectures. Skipping classes wasn't a good option - in a class size of 30, people notice when you're not there.
Putting together the first presentation to deliver to the faculty panel was also an interesting experience. Our faculty member assigned to us as a tutor has a history of his team winning the company project (4 out of the last 6 years), so he had a vested interest in seeing us do well. But that definitely didn't mean he gave us answers or was super nice - more along the lines of tough love. Our first PowerPoint draft of the presentation was returned to us with scathing comments - albeit somewhat deserved. However, it lit a fire under us and we ended up delivering a good presentation, but not of course without many days of significant sleep deprivation. The "fun" part of the first presentations was that because no confidential information about our assigned companies was involved, we delivered our presentations in front of not only the faculty panel, but also the rest of the class, and then subsequently had to sit through a round of interrogations by the panel while everyone else looked on. Fun times indeed.
This presentation was on Thursday, 29 January.
While the rest of the class got to go celebrate the successful completion of the first presentation, our sleep-deprived group had the pleasure of returning to our group room to work on another presentation to be delivered first thing in the morning for our Corporate Finance II class - a presentation analyzing the IPO of PaddyPower, and Irish betting company. And it hadn't even been really started yet...
Let's just say that I never saw that Saturday morning after all the presentations - I was passed out asleep.
Kevin still had to work while I was in town for the week, but I still had plenty of school work to get done, so the time alone ended up working out well. Ok, so I did end up sleeping and relaxing more than studying, but I like to think it was some well deserved rest! 
