Weekly journal #7

This week, we have received a positive reply from the CSR manager from GSK Madrid. She agreed to respond to our questions, thus we are currently waiting for the results of the interview. On the other hand, we are still waiting for a reply from the headquarters in the US where we could possibly conduct an interview as well with one their managers.

After the exam period for the MSc Students from ESADE and Easter holidays, it has been again difficult to coordinate with all team members. However, we all agreed we would participate in the elaboration of the final presentation and the final report, even in view of the tight schedule.

We have scheduled a Skype meeting today in order to thoroughly look at the final report and presentation's guidelines and divide the work while we are waiting for the results from the interviews. Indeed, we have noticed that the entire report is not necessarily closely linked to the results of our research. Some parts such as the definition of economic inequality or our learning experience for instance are independent topics to tackle. Therefore, during the next days ahead, we will most probably work on these parts and any other that does not depend on the results from the interview so we can move forward with the project and be as efficient as possible.

Team 8

Weekly journal #6

From April 7th to 11th, MSc students from ESADE had exams, and the other team members were away or unreachable. Therefore, the project was on hold for a few days, but this time off allowed us to take a step back and evaluate the current situation (e.g. new deliverables ahead, ways of organizing ourselves etc).

In view of the tight schedule and our calendar differences, one important matter we clarified however was asking all team members if they would be available and committed to work on the final presentation and final report.

In addition, we worked on writing interview questions for the CSR managers at GSK that we could send once we receive a confirmation from them.

Team 8

Weekly journal #5

In alignment with what we had decided over the past weeks, we contacted several GSK executives over the past two weeks in order to ask for interviews with the relevant persons within the organization.

So far we have received one negative answer from Milan, but we have reached to executives in the Madrid and London offices, and we hope to get some positive answers by the end of next week.

In parallel, we are also reaching out to experts on the subject of economic development and the pharmaceutical industry. We have leads in NYU and Esade for this matter, and we should be interviewing with them over the following weeks.

Also, we will start next week to devise a survey that we will distribute to the general public/selected groups, in order to capture the perception of the role of the pharmaceutical industry in reducing economic inequalities.

Team 8

Weekly Journal #4

Summary of Activities

After last week's video deliverable, the group agreed to take a break this week to focus on other academic activities. We met again over Skype on March 27th to discuss the results of our video and kick off the project's next phase. We have also begun to reach out to our contacts at Glaxo to see if any of them would be willing to grant us an interview and discuss GSK's corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Reflection

We again received very positive feedback from the tutors on our video deliverable, which was encouraging given the logistical problems we'd encountered in its production. The week off from the project has also helped us to refocus and gain some perspective on our next steps. Sometimes it is difficult to properly prioritize and organize a project when you're in the middle of a deliverable crunch. A little time to step back and reflect can be invaluable in determining priorities.

Next Steps

This week, team members will continue to reach out to GSK contacts both in Europe and North America, in order to determine what access we have to the company. Specifically, our NYU colleagues should be looking at making connections both in New York and a Glaxo's North American headquarters in Philadelphia. On the European side, the European team members will be working towards securing contacts both locally in Milan and Barcelona, and hopefully at Glaxo's global HQ in London.

Weekly Journal #3

Summary of Activities

This week, we decided how we were going to approach the video progress report, by sharing our thoughts and structuring the video content in our google doc, and we recorded individually the different parts of it. Then, we assembled all the parts together, and one of our team members, in view of its experience in video editing and its role as “Coordinator” for this deliverable, edited the video. Therefore, we successfully submitted our video progress report, and are now waiting to receive some feedback from the GIM coordinators.

Reflections

On one hand, this has been a positive experience since it allowed us to gather together once more, with the objective to create a video…remotely! Using this tool was also interesting since we got more familiar with the recording and editing processes. In addition to that, day after day, we get to know each other better, which lead us to adapt and find the best way to work together.

On the other hand, the video progress report also involved some challenges. Indeed, we had to use a new format for this deliverable, far from the traditional powerpoint presentations from our Business Schools. Another challenge was the editing process, which required time but we hope to have met the coordinator’s expectations. Finally, the submission of the video also had its difficulties due to its large size. It required the downloading and understanding of several softwares to be able to resize the video, send it to the coordinators and upload it on the Moodle.

Apart from these challenges, we are still quite confused about which team members will participate in the project and to what extent they will collaborate. However, we should receive updates on this regard very soon from the project coordinators.

Next steps

From now on, we will focus on the report itself since the next deliverable (i.e. final presentation) is due at the end of April. We planned a skype session in the next few days to work on the outline of the project. We will also start searching more extensively for external information and conduct interviews in our respective cities. 

Weekly Journal #2

Summary of Activities

We are now working on the video progress report due next week. We had to abandon the idea of doing a video in real-time using a skype conference call due to time constraints and the absence of most members of the group.
The idea is now to start the video with a short presentation of all of us, followed by 4 parts on our advancement, strategy, learnings and self-reflection, presented each by a member of the group.
We are still happily using Google Docs to put our toughts together, and it proves an useful tool to enable distance working and tackle the issues that long-distance collaboration involves.


Reflections

One major challenge that we are facing is that we still have not heard at all from two of our group members, and have no information about their status despite being given recurrent assurances that they are in the process of joining. Also we have been informed by Zach that there are some changes on NYU side concerning the organization of the GIM there and that it will impact his collaboration with us. We have not received information from ESADE about these changes and we are currently enquiring about it. These issues have clearly affected our work progress, since we are currently working as half a team, and we have no clear information on how that will evolve in the near future.
Therefore we have not started yet to work on planning interviews and sourcing information about GSK as we had planned in the first week. However we hope that the problems will be soon resolved and that we will be able to make decisive advances in our research from next week onwards.

In the meantime we are striving to make a comprehensive video report.

Team 8

Weekly Journal #1

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).