Learning From My Teammates

Since starting the project, we have made a lot of progress in our research and teamwork skills. One major hurdle we overcame was defining the scope of our project with our client. We were struggling to understand what the client’s expectations were so we began to frame our questions to them around how they plan to use the final deliverable for their organizational goal. Framing the question this way gave us room to discuss with them ways we thought we could accomplish this goal even if it was not spelled out in the initial terms of reference. We came to understand that our client was more flexible than we thought in regards to how we approach our research and which questions we answer through our report. 

Once that was clear we began to outline our research and dividing tasks. One of the most helpful steps in this process was that our team leader created a research matrix on google sheets with all of the sources and in one column and research questions in the proceeding columns. This was an incredibly helpful tool for organizing our thoughts in one place and is a strategy I have employed in some of my other team research at SIPA already. Once we got through an initial round of desk research and had more client meetings we determined that it would be necessary to start speaking to investors to understand their ESG considerations in order to present their thoughts as part of our final deliverable.

This presented the most challenging task my team faced to this point, segmenting the investor landscape, determining major players in each category, and preparing an interview guide for each of them. Professor Flammer and the rest of the sustainable investing consulting project class were invaluable resources in accomplishing this task. Professor Flammer pointed us to a paper she wrote that segments investors into categories which we refined to meet our project needs. She and the rest of the class then helped connect us to investors in their networks to help speed along the interview process so that we can avoid having to cold call. We made sure that each of the investors we plan to reach out to have some ESG focus by seeing if they were PRI signatories or members of similar investor coalitions. 

Again, we organized our interview guide in an excel sheet where we will have all of the answers to all of the interviews in one place. Making the excel sheet also gave us a comprehensive and easy to follow document to present to our client during our midterm presentation. They seemed to be very happy with the progress we presented. Right now, we seem to have a lot of well-organized but relatively empty excel sheets. I am looking forward to filling them out and synthesizing the results into useful recommendations for our client.