Week 5: Challenges Ahead

Initially, I thought leading the re-branding of the Seminar Room was going to be easy but in fact there are multiple scheduling challenges that I would need to face. I did not understand owning a project until I was struck by the challenge of getting the agreement of several parties. Setting expectations and making sure that everyone is on the same page was a challenge. When briefing the agency, we were able to align our expectations with the agency with a clear presentation of mandatories and explanation. It was exciting to imagine how everything will come to life in a month’s time. Through this, I realize that normal presentations are not enough, I needed to be concise and clear about each items. While through this, dealing with an external designer, the key to ensure that they don’t feel constricted in term of creativity was crucial as they are the creative agency.

After coordinating for the Chinese New Year products and MDU to arrive by start of the week, I was caught in the middle of managing my own task while scheduling a time to arrange the products. With so many this going on at the same time I had to manage my time well by being productive every single moment when I was at the office. I did not have time to arrange during the working hours and had to stay back just to ensure that I would be done by the mid of the week as promised.

As part of a major price reframe exercise conducted by the marketing and sales team, several major product need to undergo the Price Activation Form process to input the new price into the product system. These products from Australia had to restructure its volume and price. This causes multiple changes in the product code and barcode. Multiple cross-checking had to be done with several reference source were involved. With limited assistance from Mei Ying, some special cases required me to seek assistance from several other employee to retrieve cross-checking information. This prompted me to realize that regardless of how well establish a company would be certain information are not collected and organize for the use of its employees. It was a whirlwind having to look for certain information, which somewhat delayed the result of getting the task done. On top of that, there as an extensive range of signatures that was required to get the document approved. Routing the documents around was draggy and constant follow up was required to be done.