Teamwork within the Practicum Project — Mondavi Center
As a UC Davis MSBA student, I was assigned to work with three talented colleagues for Mondavi Center which is a premier performing arts venue in the Sacramento region. They had been forced to close since March 2020 due to the global pandemic, and they are planning to get help on Analytics methods to reopen in Fall 2021. Our team has William Ma as Project Manager, Edwin Liu as Technical Lead, Yingning Fan as Business Process Lead, and myself as Customer Relationship Manager. We have been working together on several projects through Zoom for the past six months. Our team is working as a flat organization with a loose hierarchy which elevates each one’s responsibility inside the team and eliminates excess layers to improve coordination and communication. I would like to share with you how we work as a team and how I learn about myself working along with my group members.
A Clear Business Impact is Essential.
It is critical to have a clear business impact expected from a project because it elevates the significance of analytics to direct our clients to move along the best path forward. It is the necessary first step to work on project Product Offerings, and our team proved this point. Mondavi Center confirmed during our regular weekly meeting that they expected a new product to gain newer customers and also re-engage existing ones. We discussed and all agreed as a team that the business impact is revenue growth and impact measurements is the percentage of new customer increase after releasing the new product. Then, we start to research for more ideas for a product to gain users.
Within our flat organization team, we could propose any possible ideas and execute them. We reached out to GSM professor Hemant Bhargave because he has expert experience in product pricing strategies, the product design field, and product mix strategies. I provided information about our ideas of business impact at the beginning of our conversation. He quickly understood our goals suggested some excellent advice, such as creating a community for the online user through social media and enabling face-to-face with performers for a closer experience between performers and viewers. I gathered Bhargave’s valuable ideas and viewed Mondavi user’s demography history on Google Analytics to make sure the new idea applies to Mondavi Center. I shared the conversation and my conclusions with the team and they shared their thoughts on having a project’s business impact on the heart. We are still working on this but the following work was much clearer after determining the business impact.
Going Beyond
It is always beneficial to think beyond current projects for more insightful recommendations. We worked on a project regarding scaling the performance hall with social distancing and calculated the profit for new scaled seats. William was the main person for this part. He found out that the profit result was stunningly lower than the benchmark profit, and he shared the results with us immediately. We were all worried because the estimated profit for the next seasons was one-fourth of what they expected. We set up a meeting and went over our thoughts and processes to verify all calculations. William accepted that our clients would not be satisfied with this outcome. I suggested brainstorming more methods for Mondavi to reduce expenses or to add revenue in other theater-related services. We all thought that was a fair point and collaborated on talking about possible solutions. Because there is no hierarchy in the team, we actively discussed all ideas in a stress-free environment. Someone brought that Mondavi could play one performance twice, therefore Mondavi could save expense from using the same crew and increase the revenue of satisfying high demand performances. Our presentation was successful in that our client included our extension in consideration of their next planning step. Our group worked together to move forward based on our findings to approach the client’s needs.
Overcome Challenges
Our school provides a significant number of resources for us in case we are stuck on complex questions. We have indeed encountered many difficulties while working on Mondavi Project, thus we reach out to people who could help us to provide the best service for Mondavi. The following two examples illustrated how we had overcome the difficulties as a team. Our group discussed potential analytical methods to predict accurate sales for Mondavi for a long time. Our Tech Lead and PM with their knowledge believed that it was hard for us to predict. Since Mondavi did not have a great amount of data plus, they always introduced more genres for the next season. I reached out to our TA, and we discussed all together with a possible solution of how to provide valuable sales prediction with existing data. Our TA provided some possible methods for us to try, and we all agreed that one of those methods would work. In addition, we have regular meetings with our mentor Vince Vengapally, who is working in Google Product Management. I updated him as a communicator on our concerns of seating scaling and potential shift customer demand. One day, he thought that he has a friend who is Director of Analytics at the Oakland A’s. Oakland A’s is also thinking about seating in 2021 using historical data patterns. We had a better understanding of our projects after talking with them and successfully delivered our projects to Mondavis Center.
We are representing students of UC Davis MSBA, and all of us want to get practice as much as we can. Being newcomers, we are not afraid of asking questions to clarify any confusion. Once we meet a challenge, we are not stuck at the original point but reach out to others for more opportunities altogether. We motivate each other when we lack confidence, and we will successfully overcome those obstacles as a team.
Looking Ahead
As the Customer Relationship Manager in our team, I mainly help our team effectively communicate with other parties and organize our internal group's documents. In addition, I lead two of Mondavi’s projects successfully. I will continue to work in my role using the turrent method.
Our group works well with the flat structure for the past several months because all of our team members tried their best to contribute to the practicum project. We will continue to use this structure. Also, we will follow the right project management and formulate our working process to build our brand.
