PwC Employability E-learn Interview script - Jessica

Video – Manage Projects:

Candidate: Jessica

Watch option B:

Interviewer: Please describe a time when you’ve successfully managed a project for example coursework or organising an event?

Okay, I’m part of the hockey club at university and earlier this year I got the club a new team kit through getting a new sponsor on board. Our old contract had expired with the last sponsor…..so it was a new season we just wanted a fresh start. I was team captain, but took on the role of managing the process; I wanted my team to look the best out of  all of the University teams. Our first competitive match was early in the new term….so we only had a few weeks to get everything sorted….and it was a lot of work.

Interviewer: Okay, so what did you need to do?

Right, so basically… I got the whole team involved and split up the tasks between us – as time was tight….it was a good learning experience for some of the newer members…. they would probably need to do it again in a couple of years, depending on how much money we got  (jokingly)! So I was responsible for researching the costs for the new kit – which also included trying to get a discount with one of the kit suppliers. I had to be organised in getting this done……after all, our pitch to the potential sponsors would depend on having the right cost information…..so I needed to make sure everything  was accurate.

For the other team members, I asked them to try and get appointments with potential sponsors…..basically local retailers, businesses and some of the companies who ran events on our campus who we thought might see the benefit of having their company name on our tops …..we had a really good season last year so we thought it could be worth their while. I asked the team to speak to our student union….just so we could get a bit more advice about pulling together the proposals. They help lots of the societies with this kind of thing…..so we thought it would be good if they were on our side and they could help us too.

Interviewer: And how did you go about planning the project, given the short time scales you were working to?

I used a small project plan just to keep track of what we needed to have done and when we needed it done by …….nothing too fancy….I sort of worked backwards from our first match…..counted that as my deadline…..then planned when we needed to do certain things by……when we needed to  pitch to the potential sponsors…all that sort of thing……then I added in some more time as well because I know it can take some time for them to get things done at their end …… I didn’t want anything to impact us on getting the new kit.

I set this up as a shared calendar on google so the whole team had access to this. I added in things,  the big milestones like ‘proposal completion’ and planned when we needed to pitch to the sponsors….so then they could start booking in some time for us to visit them. I suggested that we met weekly – half an hour before training – so we could all catch up on progress in case there was something I needed to know – as project manager - or there was something I needed help out with ….and this worked well this way as we were always up to speed on everything – and that way everyone comes to training!!

Interviewer: What challenges did you have to overcome?

The biggest challenge we faced was… one of the businesses we pitched to said they couldn’t offer us sponsorship because of internal changes. We were only told this a few days after our pitch to them…..That means we had lost a few days which was a really big disappointment. I was worried we may not be able to get a sponsor as we hadn’t heard back from the other businesses yet. So, I made it a priority to pitch to another company. I got some of the team onto calling the others businesses that we’d contacted, but they hadn’t got back to us….just to follow up our emails in case they missed it….I asked the other girls to start contacting new businesses to get another pitch. We managed to get another business to see us the next day near campus and we made it clear when we needed their final decision by, just in case we didn’t hear from anyone.

Interviewer: And what was the outcome?

(Really enthusiastic and happy) Yeah we got a new kit funded by a local bar….… we had the kit printed and it arrived a few days before the first match…..and it looked really really good. I don’t think this would have happened if I wasn’t so organised with planning the tasks for the team. ……..the project plan I created really helped to keep everyone on track, getting the team working on different tasks and that meant we met all the deadlines. Prioritising things like the costs and speaking to the Student Union helped us put together a strong proposal……and because I had planned ahead we had time to deal with the issue of the business pulling out. If I didn’t have that plan in place we might not have been able to deal with it in time to get another sponsor.  It was a great result for the team, we didn’t win our first match but we’ve had a really good run since and are currently top of the league!  We’ve also struck up a really good link with our sponsor and we go to the bar after every match for what we call a ‘debrief’ (laughs) just to plan for our next match so they’re really happy too as they’re getting loads of extra business.