WEEK 5

CONTENT SUMMARY

It's been a while since we had a content packed session like we did in the first session of the semester, so it was a welcome change when Peter said we had more of a content filled session today. The content of today's session was the basics of Competition Advantage/Unique Selling Point, SWOT Analysis, Porter's Five Forces, and Porter's Three Strategies. Prior to class I had conducted my own research into SWOT Analysis, Porter's Five Forces, and Porter's Three Strategies but hadn't done any research on Competition Advantage/Unique Selling Point. As I had already collected the research for three out of the four tools, the new information we covered that I didn't collect research on were:

• Competitive Advantage/Unique selling point: What sets a project apart from the competition? What you do well or better than your competitors and leads to the reason why your customers come to you instead of a rival. Was it because of price, quality, experience, branding first mover advantage, customer service, uniqueness, skill?

• First mover advantage: is being the first of your kind in the market. It doesn't last forever however as some will look at what you do and say they can do it better which can threaten your position.

During the session we were asked to start quickly jot down some points to these tools with our groups. These points where to be about our chosen disrupter and applying all four tools to our disruptor. At the end of class we completed the meeting minutes worksheet to assign each of us a task to have completed by next session.

POST CLASS REFLECTION - INDIVIDUAL PROGRESS

At this stage of the trimester I'm pretty confident in the work I am producing and having doing the pre class activities that are asked of us is really benefiting me in understanding what is being taught in class. I am also finding this unit to be a lot more interesting than I had originally thought and also finding the tools to be a lot more useful to what I may be doing after my studies if I ever wanted to go into business for myself, which I have considered.

So for the upcoming project I volunteered to research how Auto-Tune's impact on the industry affects the Porter's five forces tool as I found it a lot more straight forward than the others albeit being more work than the other topics. It's not too much of a hassle as we had wrote brief answers during class that need to be fleshed out and collect accompanying research to support those answers.

POST CLASS REFLECTION - GROUP DYNAMICS

Our group is probably at the norming stage at the moment. Unfortunately Cody wasn't in today without informing us which meant we had to delegate the easier parts of the project to him. I think we are all at a stage where we know most of our strengths and weaknesses so assigning Cody with the easier parts and leaving the more arduous tasks for Jack, Kieran and myself is the best bet for us to well at this project.

It may be necessary for us to discuss with Cody about his attendance and how it might impact the group in the upcoming project, but I feel we aren't at that stage just yet. We have a Google Chat group set up so that all the documents and shared files are in one spot easy for everyone to access at this stage. As we don't want to be overwhelmed with the amount of research we need to conduct we've only assigned the tools that were covered today to be completed by next week's session.