Today the day arrived where I would be taking part in the York St. John Sustainability Challenge for Green Week. This morning I woke up feeling excited about this amazing opportunity that I was able to take part in. When I logged on the Gradconsultuk team were there to greet us all, after everyone had joined they explained what the day was going to consist of in terms of teaching and group activities. 

The day began by the Gradconsultuk team going through the project set-up model also known as BGOS (Brief, Goals, Objectives, Scope), this was something that I wasn’t aware of so this was the first piece of information that I took away from the day. This model may be of use to me in the future when planning for personal projects of planning for future projects within the workplace. After this had been explained we were given the first task to complete in groups and this was in regards to stakeholders. However, as the first groups were set up I encountered some WIFI issues, which meant that I could not take part in the first task. After some time attempting to rectify the issue, my WIFI was back up and running after the lunch break. I re-joined the zoom link and this fortunately meant I was able to take part in tasks 2 and 3. 

Even though I did not have the opportunity to take part in task 1, I thoroughly enjoyed taking part in task 2 and 3. Task 2 was given to us to make a business decision that may affect our stakeholders, this decision was to decide with the company we wanted to choose to fulfil the work that needed to be done. These options were formed from two well known businesses and a newly started business, the two well known businesses were over budget and they would take more time than we had available. Whereas the newly started business were charging on budget and still went over the time available however, we made the decision to go with the newly started business to allow them the exposure and the fact that they were charging less for the same job as the others was a bonus. Task 2 continued into task 3 where we discussed evaluation tools, which we decided to use KPIs and Rewards.  

The group that I was assigned to after I was able to re-join were great, we all got on really well and the conversations were flowing nicely. This meant we were able to communicate well and achieve tasks 2 & 3 with time to spare. This encouraged us to talk about ourselves as individuals, gain an understanding of what we were all studying at the university and where we were residing in the current pandemic. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the day and I was grateful to have been able to attend and gain some really useful information that I will be able to rely on for any future personal, academic and workplace projects that I decide to complete.