Describe challenges you encountered while collecting and analyzing interview data and share lessons learned from the activity (250–400 words).
With my specific client organization, I am having a lot of issues with availability of stakeholders and the presence of circumstances that are needed for various assignments. As it is an innovation center at a university (perhaps not the wisest choice, although in “real life” I am quite passionate about what they do), the unique challenges proposed by COVID-19, as well as simply the time of year, have made it somewhat difficult to follow along with the organization. For example, they will go weeks without many, or any, actual meetings, and much work is from home or independent, with limited hours, both due to COVID-19 and the summer season / holidays/ students on break or not on campus, which is obviously not the peak time for university activity. The actual startup accelerator is taking place starting in October, but the activities will increase in next year as they get closer to their actual “Pitch Date” in April. Additionally, as the CIE deals with innovation and entrepreneurs, most of these folks are hard to pin down as it is, but now even moreso are working remotely all over the place and taking frequent digital breaks. Many of my most relevant stakeholders are/have been on multi-week vacations.
For the executed interview, it was definitely a bit of a challenge to keep it focused and on-task, as well as to stick to 10 minutes. They had extra time, however, and so was fine (in fact, insisted a bit) with talking for a longer duration of time, so we discussed some more “off the record” type things; again, this occurred because I am actually invested in this organization outside of the course (I was a mentor and advisor for the program last year as well, and am an alumnus of the university). I feel like a challenge for the data gathering itself, in general, has, for me, been a justification of why I need the data and what exactly I’m going to do with it – what tangibly am I going to do to add value to the organization in exchange for the effort needed to talk to me and give me the requisite data and resources?
That being said, this particular assignment has, so far, been pretty easy as far as asking for what I need – I chose participants with a certain degree of candor, and I am familiar with a lot of the undercurrents due to my unique position of familiarity with the institution and Baltimore city. Only major issue has been the availability of the stakeholders. I chose not to record the first interview, as he just wanted to do a phone call; people are pretty tired of Zoom at this point.
