Personal Contributions by Going Outside the Box

Throughout my internship so far at Cavi Consulting, I have had the opportunity to work on many different types of projects, both big and small. However, recently I have been working on a fairly large project in conjunction with my fellow intern and student Andrew Talcott. After attending a virtual live training early on in the internship program that was given by our boss, we were asked to help revamp two of the exercises within the training to make them more virtual-friendly as they are trying to restructure the current curriculum for virtual trainings.

For this project we went through the entire process project lifecycle of creating a project charter, creating a map of the current process, and then creating a more efficient “to-be” map. In between all of these steps we had many meetings with fellow interns and our bosses in order to brainstorm ideas and make sure that we were truly focussing on solving the root issues. What we found and ultimately decided upon was surprising: these exercises were confusing and unnecessary. Initially, our bosses were somewhat skeptical, but we managed to sway them with our logic. The concepts that these exercises were reinforcing, while important, were not central concepts for this training. The instructions were confusing and required learners to toggle back and forth from a spreadsheet to the video. Instead, we pitched that we film a simplified version of the exercises as a sort of tutorial so that learners could still get an understanding of the concepts and then include a short multiple-choice quiz to reinforce the learning. This system works much better for a virtual learning environment and also cut the length of this section of the training from an hour down to about 40 minutes. Our bosses ended up being so pleased that they asked us to record the session ourselves so that we could be in the training.

Without our willingness to try something different and go outside the box with our ideas, Andrew and I would have contributed something entirely different. Through our many brainstorming meetings and attempts at creating a workable project charter and process maps, we were able to come up with a new perspective and look at what would be most effective in this training. Without sharing our ideas or perspectives, there would have been a very different outcome with this project. It was really great to see our hard work and ideas be accepted and implemented into the training even though it may not have been their first choice on how to tackle this specific project.