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Individual Reflection Portfolio

Introduction
As an advertising and design background student, who has a strong interest in business and business management, I had a lot of expectations for this Business Project subject. In the first class I have already addressed my high expectation of seeing the ‘truth’ behind the industry (how an industry operates, how different departments of a company cooperate with each other); Turning knowledge into practice (identify and solve a real-world business problem), and utilising my skills and ability to contribute to the project (design skill, creative thinking, my determination).

This is an individual learning portfolio aimed to critically reflect the learning process of the group project I’ve worked as a part of for the past three and half months. This reflective writing focusses on critically reviewing four aspects: the consulting, the academic, the group dynamic and personal growth.

Consulting
The client my group consulted for was a start-up company, who provide a smartphone app based service that allows users to pre-order and pre-pay for food and coffee. The major problem they wanted to solve was to increase the existing user value per transaction.

One of the things I have learned about consulting is the importance of communication. As our client is a start-up company, a lot of their information and data were outdated or had not been documented. Moreover, most of the people who work in the company are motivated, but only knew their tasks and deadline, without understanding the company (strength, weakness, short and long term vision). For instance, without talking to the manager who is in charge of the IT design and operation, we would never have known part of their app developing is outsourced in Manila, Philippines, and every single small function they added into the app, needed to take about 4 weeks to

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