Summary of Activities
This week marked the beginning of our team's work on the Global Integrative Module. After establishing communication on ESADE's virtual studio, our group held our first conference call over Skype on March 2, with the aim of getting to know each other and determining how to move forward on our first set of deliverables. During that meeting, we made several important decisions regarding communications platforms to use going forward, as well as assigning roles to each team member. We also concluded that the pharmaceutical industry, and specifically GlaxoSmithKline, would be an interesting case study, and decided to move forward with that topic.
We met again over Skype on March 3 to finalize the Definition of Scope and Strategy Documents. After editing, the documents were submitted for review.
Reflections
We consider our first week together a success. After taking some time to get to know each other through forum posts, we found it much easier and to communicate via Skype conference call. We were also quick to decide on several communications channels, with an emphasis on social media platforms. Communicating through social media has made team members more immediately available and helped us get quicker turnaround and feedback when issues arise. The choice of Google Drive as our primary drafting platform was also a good one. The ability to see edits made by other team members to a document in real time proved very valuable as we completed the first set of deliverables.
As we became acquainted with each other, we were also very surprised to discover the highly diverse group of nationalities and backgrounds that made up our team. It's refreshing to be able to work on an assignment with a truly international perspective, and we think these unique viewpoints will enable us to deliver a much more complete project at the end of the day.
Of course, there is always room for improvement. One particular challenge we faced was internal coordination of meeting times and schedules. As always in a virtual team, the time difference between team members presents a very unique dilemma, and it will be very important going forward to coordinate well among ourselves to ensure that each team member has the opportunity to give his or her input.
In addition, a few team members have experienced technical difficulties which have limited their contributions to this point. Hopefully, these technical issues can be resolved soon so that we can attack the next set of deliverables with all hands on deck.
Next Steps
The next deliverable in the GIM is a Video Progress Report, due on March 17th. By that time, we hope to have completed some preliminary research on GlaxoSmithKline's current social initatives as well as potential 'impact areas' where they could make a large difference in people's lives. We also hope to have established communication with some representatives of the company at their offices in our base cities (Barcelona, New York, Milan, and Seoul), with the aim of securing interviews. Finally, we'd like to reach out to GSK's London headquarters with the aim of sending a team member or group of members to England to conduct some on-site research. This will be discussed at our next Skype conference call, scheduled for March 6 at 19:00 (Barcelona time).
