The End of Integration Moment II

Haaah.. At last, the Integration Moment II has finished.. So relieved..

Integration Moment(IM) is a "special" course in MOT (my master program--Management of Technology) which takes place at the end of every semester. It consists of a big (i mean BIG) collaborative assignment which covers all courses in that particular semester. In addition to the complexity of the assignment, collaboration problem with group members might occur (and it did in my case).

The assignment for Integration Moment I in the 1st semester was the issue of eBay buying Skype. In this 2nd semester, the assignment was making a proposal to fulfill the tender from 3 Technical Universities for a novel joint graduate school in Netherlands with the innovation of new learning. The students were divided in 2 arenas, in which we were divided again in 4 companies. I was in Blackboard, the ICT company. The other 3 companies were Deloitte (consultant for new learning and project management), Reed Elsevier (publisher and knowledge management expert), and Bouwfonds (building expert). Each company consisted of 5 students.

We had to work as a consortium of 4 companies to win the tender (around 20 people), as well as protecting our own company's interests and goals within the consortium. So the IM2 was full of meetings and negotiations. The 2.5 weeks was cramped with scheduled meetings with the consortium and the consultants(the lecturers), not to mention every consultancy documents and consortium & company papers that we had to submit. Very tiring but in the end felt like the most productive period in semester 2.

And that's the motive of this post, to celebrate the end of the IM2 on Thursday 26 June 2008, hehehe :D After the final presentation to the 3TU board, our consortium went out to a park and had a relaxing BBQ time under the warm sun, while our rival, the consortium in arena 2 was having their final presentation, haha :D