Organizing the Original Work

This past week in ISM I primarily spent my time organizing my original work. However, before I really got into that, I had to create an evaluation of my ISM experience thus far. This was important to me for several reasons. First of all, it provided a nice break from the relatively time consuming and overtly monotonous research/interview assessments. The research and interview assessments are beneficial and they are integral for not only professional development but also development in terms of acquired research and knowledge. With this evaluation, I was given the opportunity to really slow down and take a step back from the constant fast pace that ISM constantly perpetuates and just take a deep breath. This time of the ISM calendar is by far the most demanding so to have an assignment that provided a designated time to reflect was extremely beneficial from a mental health standpoint. However, I did still work towards my goal of completing my original work on time. Primarily, I had to begin synthesizing all of the research that I had completed thus far regarding my original work. This involved me combing through every single annotation over the course of 10+ assessments to find the most worthy improvements to make to the preexisting Stage-Gate model. This was by far the biggest challenge that I encountered this past week. It became extremely hard at times to determine what was worthy of including and what was not. However, I overcame this challenge through the implementation of one of my biggest strengths, perseverance. I pushed through it and eventually sifted through all of the assessments to finally find the most helpful improvements. With that being said, I look forward to completing my original work with the necessary groundwork established.