Analysis

Overview

Throughout this semester we were working with the Haight Ashbury Food Program on the Center of the Plate project which was created to provide a pathway out of poverty for homeless, unemployed and impoverished San Francisco residents. Through job placement and retention the program helps their students locate jobs and establish themselves in the culinary field.

On our first meeting as a group we discussed what each member wanted to get out of this project, and started researching on different non-profit organizations and deciding which company we would like to work with. Our group had chosen this program because we wanted to serve and help our community to make it a better place to be. We really wanted this program to be successful and we had the required skills that would help this project to move along. We were attracted by the idea that this program is actually helping people by giving them an opportunity to get some education with which they will be able to get a job and make a first step to a life they wanted, rather then just giving them food and letting them go. In other words, if a lot of people will take this opportunity, this community would be a lot better and safer. By knowledge about the program and by support community has a chance to help their neighbors because no one knows who could be in that place tomorrow asking for help. Once this goal is achieved, community will help and support each other. We really felt that we could help this program by promoting it, finding donors and letting everybody know what we are trying to achieve with this project.

In order to help this project succeed, we had to apply pretty much everything we had learned in our business courses. Those things include, but not limited to, team work, leadership, marketing skills, communication skills, decision making and research methods as well as others. Closer to the end we had to experience different situations that really taught us a lot about life. We learned how everything works out in life and how it differs from theories.

Analysis

Teamwork and Leadership

At first let's talk about how teamwork and leadership important for solving complications we had encountered in order to achieve desired results. At first we have to define what team is. Team is a group of people that work closely together on achieving the same goal. Our team included six people, Yana Lipkina, Hayley Shula, Jessica Anderson, Kenichi Miyagi, David Rodriguez, and Cedric Cosiac. We had a lot of difficulties due to individual differences and at the same time those helped us with brainstorming. Some of us were motivated more then others, and were ready to put in more into success of our project. As well, our team had a lot of cultural diversity that helped us to analyze problems from different perspectives which helped us to get to the results our client was expecting. We had weekly status meetings where we were discussing what was done as well as brainstormed on new issues. Unfortunately, our team did not have a leader position because people did not want that much responsibility and that caused our team to be not well structured and organized. We should have picked a leader from day one, who would manage the whole project, but after long discussions we decided not to do that because it would be unfair to the leader since he or she would have the most amount of work. Instead we decided to go with the "round table" approach, where everyone is equal and is completely responsible for their actions.

Communication

Most of our problems arose from improper use of our inner communication skills as well as school scheduling. Most people were taking more than one class this semester, which required group meetings and working on different projects. That led to the lack of time required for completing projects for each class. Due to that issue, some of the team members had to skip our meetings and not doing their tasks. However this is not always an excuse. Prior to the meetings we were trying to pick a time such that it would work out for each member of our team, but people still did not show up due to non-responsibility. I think this was not only the problem of those people who did not show up occasionally, but also it was a fault of every member of our team because we were not able to motivate them enough. Because of the lack of time, we could not re-iterate what was covered during our meetings. Partial solution to this problem could be taping our meetings and make those tapes available to the whole team so that everybody could get up to speed on what was going on. That solution would make a huge improvement on our inner communication. However by taping and sharing the information, which was discussed, would not give our project needed speed, because those people who did not show up, would be able only to listen, which would be one way communication, and not responding and bringing up new ideas. The initial communication problem arose when our client, Nyna Caputi, could not state clearly what she wanted us to do. This made us waist a lot of time in the beginning. Once we all got to the same page, everything was running pretty smoothly between our group and the client. Luckily our client was really responsive when we had any questions, ideas and issues.

Brainstorming

During our brainstorming sessions we were also considering what would it take to market that idea and weather or not it was worth our time and effort. At first, we decided that our main target was our school, since it was very close and we thought that we could attract a lot of traffic with free lunch opportunity. Later on, we decided to place a post on USF Connect. However, students would not give any donations, which is what this whole project is aiming for. Then we decided to increase the range of people by creating and distributing flyers. We were giving those flyers on the campus, to people on the streets close to Haight Ashbury and nearby businesses. Due to the lack of time, we decided that we should not stop there and we started sending out letters to different newspaper editors to get their attention and help us spread the word. As a result, we had Haight Ashbury Beat representative stop by and interview consumers, volunteers and students during one of the lunches. Then, we went one step further and we have created a website that contained information about project, the menu, mini biographies of our chefs as well as other useful information. Since we had limited space, every consumer had to make a reservation using our website. That gave us a better idea of how many people would come and