I am back after a ‘brief’ hiatus from the blogging world and happy to be back again. Why was I gone for so long? No particularly good reason other than the frenzy of christmas, the panic of returning to class with no sold product etc.
The real issues is I am a writer. I love writing and as a person enrolled on the creative writing course it is something I do a lot. Writing a blog, thats very different and something I do struggle with given that I like to think I can write about anything but myself. Pages and pages of the word I, make me feel slightly uneasy and self centred but this is what I must do. I had previously thought that I would be fine without having to meticulously plot every second I spent thinking and breathing passport 2, yet I was wrong.
So summary… I am happy with the way our business has progressed and feel like everyone has their parts to play and does. I think we initially set deadlines which now seem a little too ambitious but once we had missed that hurdle we simply re-grouped and made new plans. This I feel is a good team.
December was a trying month, as it approached Christmas and hence a break from nearly everything. We had to hand in our business plan and feasibility report. Of course this was alongside various other pieces of work we had to hand in individually, so a very tense moment. Still in typical passport2guides, Pinar and myself spent the better part of the day in a beautiful cafe in brick lane, frantically begging for more internet tokens from the shop owner, while eating good food. Stressful? Yes. Fun? Yes as well. This we handed in and I was very pleased with the marks we got back on both pieces. As much as it was simply two pieces of work, it was nice to know taking time of other assignments for a group project was appreciated in some way.
Our last session was on branding and while I had never really thought about how much it meant to company, it made a lot of sense to me. It also came at time when Passport2 was thinking about issues such as that. Having just won two (although technically three) of the dragons in the dragon’s den session, we were on a high. The guide and presentation looked amazing, but we were also moving more towards a cyber magazine, given that we had missed our printers deadlines.
We all, I gathered, felt pleased with the new output but I especially was slightly apprehensive as to how everything would work. Still we went away for Christmas.
January, new year and new feelings about our project. I felt as Corinne mentioned one Friday, that during Christmas I had taken a holiday from the business as I had uni and work and coming back I felt guilty that I had imagined I could place it on hold. In my defence though, most people I spoke to, from other teams had done a similar thing. I think its because you get so used to school holidays, everything waiting in the classroom, just as you left you, no real time passing. But this was so much different.
My team pulled ourselves back together, I felt at the time and we were all clear on what happening . yet everything suffered a blow, I personally felt. Months of meetings, emails, phone calls and sweet talking to get us into the international student welcome fair, came to nothing. Being that I had found this lead and personally chased it up, I was disappointed.
We began classes again yet not having our usual Friday afternoons with Corinne, again meant that although we met on Tuesdays for group meetings, momentum was lost ever so slightly. My team following this regrouped and we decided that the previous method of one person content finder, wasn’t working. So we split it up. I got shopping.
The idea of being in charge of a shopping page excited me but made some my friends laugh. Still I felt that because I had never really liked that way shopping pages in magazines or online were done, I would be the perfect person to change them. And I was right. I spent various hours, in Kingston running from shop to shop asking questions and attempting to find the most unique thing about each shop, it was sometimes difficult but at other times I was genuinely excited by what they were offering. Pictures were taken, etc etc.
It was a good week and the novelty of the shopping page propelled me on. Yet it was only after I had written most of my pages that I disaster stuck. An emergency group meeting was called and I was very worried about where passport 2 would be going. We were calm and civilised and paved over the issue- for the sake of our business.
Being in that situation, with my fellow team mates, made me really think about how our team had worked. It made me question the work that each of us had done. At first I thought it might have been best to have a time sheet that everyone used stupid idea. Because I think a team cannot work if you do not trust people to do what they have to do. I think everyone is doing their bit ad while it may not always seem like , not everyone can be doing everything at once. The nature of business such as our means that different people have roles that run in canon with each other. I could be wrong.
Anyway, the meeting did bring up some really good forward runners.
- A new website! I, as beginner web designer, was pleased to be moving to wordpress as I had more familiarity with it.
- An editor to overlook and unify all content so it was less ‘patchworky’.
- A deadline to send all information to the editor.
- And a return the personal. Something we had all been really passionate about in the beginning but had possibility los focus of.
All this of course motivated me and after reading through magazines and using a guidebook myself in a real situation, made me what to delete the cold hard informative voice that I had used in my first article draft and replace it with what I loved doing, telling stories.
While it sounds obvious to me now, I almost forgot that the course was about combining the creativity with the business. Silly. Yes it took much more time and thought but I like it much more and will be sticking to it. So that is where we are now.
New website is up with content including my Links of London article. And the business is steaming forwards.
