The submission of our midterm presentation this week marks the halfway point of this experience. When we first started on this project for our client, we were really pleased to see that the scope of our research was relatively clear and narrow compared to that of many of our classmates. We anticipated the research would mainly be straightforward quantitative modeling, and we were excited to leverage our financial and Excel skills on the kind of analysis that several of us had undertaken in our prior professional experience. The quantitative aspect to the project has remained integral to our outputs, but as with any project, we have needed to pivot our research and expand the scope to an extent. Data challenges can be pretty pervasive when it comes to sustainability research – whether it’s a lack of data, time lags, or disparate sources, these issues can be a major roadblock to meeting a client’s expectations.
We have faced some of these challenges in our research, leading our team to explore new ways in which we can present our findings to the client. While our analysis has become less quantitative and more qualitative over time, we feel very confident in and proud of our work up to this point. Additionally, data challenges present a great opportunity for us to collaborate with our client in generating potential solutions going forward. I’ve learned the importance of always being forthcoming with the client when situations like these arise in order to align expectations and prevent miscommunication over future outputs. To some, under-promising and over-delivering is the best way to succeed! If we don’t have the data to perform the exact analysis that was expected of us, the client needs to know in a timely manner. That said, I am really looking forward to sharing our interim findings with our client later this week and discussing how we can best proceed through the second half of the project timeline. It has been a really great learning experience brainstorming with my team members on different ways to present information that can ultimately achieve what the client wanted, even if it wasn’t explicitly stated at the outset.