ASSESSMENT SUBMISSION & DECLARATION

QUALIFICATION UNIT NUMBER AND TITLE

PEARSON BTEC HIGHER NATIONAL DIPLOMA IN BUSINESS (RQF) 22. PRODUCT & SERVICE DEVELOPMENT (LEVEL 5)

STUDENT NAME ASSESSOR NAME

AHSAN JAVED BEENISH NAWAZ

DATE ISSUED COMPLETION DATE SUBMITTED ON

MONDAY, 11TH JANUARY 2021 FRIDAY, 7TH MAY 2021 FRIDAY, 7TH MAY 2021

ASSIGNMENT TITLE CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT AS A TEAM TASK

ASSESSMENT CRITERIA TASK NUMBER EVIDENCE PAGE NUMBER

PASS 1 TASK 1

PASS 2 TASK 1

PASS 3 TASK 1

PASS 4 TASK 1

PASS 5 TASK 1

PASS 6 TASK 2

MERIT 1 TASK 1

MERIT 2 TASK 1

MERIT 3 TASK 1

MERIT 4 TASK 2

DISTINCTION 1 TASK 1

DISTINCTION 2 TASK 2

PLAGIARISM
Plagiarism is a particular form of cheating. Plagiarism must be avoided at all costs and students who break the rules, however
innocently, may be penalised. It is your responsibility to ensure that you understand correct referencing practices. As a
university level student, you are expected to use appropriate references throughout and keep carefully detailed notes of all
your sources of materials for material you have used in your work, including any material downloaded from the Internet.

LEARNER DECLARATION

I CERTIFY THAT THE ASSIGNMENT SUBMISSION IS ENTIRELY MY OWN WORK AND I FULLY UNDERSTAND THE CONSEQUENCES OF PLAGIARISM. I
UNDERSTAND THAT MAKING A FALSE DECLARATION IS A FORM OF MALPRACTICE.

STUDENT SIGNATURE: AHSAN JAVED DATE: FRIDAY, 7TH MAY 2021

Introduction

Established in 1962, Ittehad Chemicals Limited was founded by a private entrepreneur under the
name of United Chemicals. The business has a factory strategically situated on the Grand Truck Road’s
nineteenth to twentieth kilometer of the road and be spread across a one hundred and six acre area of
land. This factory can then be approached through the Motorway that connects Islamabad and Lahore
alongside from being accessible from Lahore’s main areas with the overall drive time taking less than an
hour. This location is an industrial site that, through the last few decades, has seen considerable growth.
Kala Shah Kaku, the area that Ittehad Chemicals Limited’s factory is situated, is one that stretches
alongside the Grand Truck Road and toward Gujranwala. Kala Shah Kaku, as well as the vicinities that
neighbor it, have attained considerably focus in recent years and have become an educational,
economic, and commercial activity hub. As the last handful of years have seen industrialization flourish
within Pakistan (Gutierrez-Gutierrez, Barrales-Molina and Kaynak 2018), a number townships have come
about around and near these such areas because of the availability of occupation for those living there
(Gutierrez-Gutierrez, Barrales-Molina and Kaynak 2018).

MISSION

In particular, the mission of Ittehad Chemicals Limited is that of:

 Creating an environment that is able to retain and attract the highest amount of talent
 Securitizing energy and optimizing cost by means of advanced technologies
 Catering to the varying levels of satisfaction of individual customers
 Making sure that the company does not damage the environment in which it operates
 Placing corporate social responsibility at the organization’s heart

VISION

The vision of the organization is that of being Pakistan’s best technology and talent’s Ittehad,
one that acts as a catalyst to deliver customers with sustainable products thereby optimizing investor
returns.

New Product Development

For any company, it is important to continually develop new products as every individual
product has its own lifecycle. Thus, each company has to chance to conduct its business with a given
product for a set amount of time. Due to this, companies have to update and improve their products so
as to maintain pace with the demands of the market at hand. The development of a new product can be
a risky venture as should a company be unable to do so it is likely to face a fall in sales and thus fall
behind its contemporaries.

Idea Generation

Currently, the world itself is a soup of harmful environmental pollution. Literature shows that
plastic pollution includes plastic product accumulation within the environment thereby negatively
affecting wildlife habitats, humans, and wildlife itself. Plastic pollution has a negative impact on oceans,
waterways, and land areas. Efforts to reduce plastic pollution have taken place in some parts of the
world so as to decrease the consumption of plastic and further the recycling of this material. By
evaluating all adverse impacts, one is able to arrive at a possible conclusion regarding how the
environment can be improved by utilizing plastic in a safe manner or by ensuring that plastic use and
waste does not occur in excess. Then, it is important for companies such as Ittehad Chemicals Limited to
ensure that they can utilize technologies such as polyester yarn produced from plastic bottles to further
their recycling capability or other similar ideas.

Screening of the Ideas

The second step in new product development is that of screening a given idea. Within Ittehad
Chemicals Limited, the company has to ability to ensure that it can move in a number of directions with
its product development capabilities. When teams are confronted with initiative prioritization, they
generally attempt to arrive at conclusions themselves or ask leaders to offer a purpose ( Cheng and Yang
2019). Without properly comprehending the needs and desires of the consumer, companies such as
Ittehad Chemicals Limited are unlikely to understand how to best utilize their resources. Idea screening
then aids in idea measurement based on set metrics to comprehend the idea’s uniqueness, relevance,
and process. By attaining early feedback from customers, companies are likely to identify ideas that have
the most market potential. In particular, when coming up with ideas, it can be challenging to
comprehend where the focus should be placed (Gutierrez-Gutierrez, Barrales-Molina and Kaynak 2018).
In this sense, it is important to ensure that brainstorming is able to actively take place so as to allow for
the company as a whole to take part in the process of idea generation.

Test Marketing

During this stage, a marketing initiative and product are introduced into a realistic setting of
marketing (Cheng and Yang 2019). There are three categories in test marketing but the current paper
only focuses on standard test marketing. This type of marketing takes place through the use of flyers,
billboards, online advertisements, and seminars to introduce the product itself (Cheng and Yang 2019).

Product Development

In of itself, the process of developing a product includes the testing and creating of several
physical outcomes of the process of development and research. Product development must have to be:
(1) Customer concerned; (2) Team based; and (3) Systematic (Mauerhoefer, Strese and Brettel 2017). In
this sense, it is important to have a research and development party that collects information and
generates new idea to modify products with the market trends and demands (Mauerhoefer, Strese and
Brettel 2017). This department is in charge of collecting customer idea from customer who use the
product and from dealers who sell the product (Bashir, Papamichail and Malik 2017).

A pronounced product development strategy is a necessary link between a company's product

development and its general business strategy and should be a natural component of this. Despite this,
there is a lack of a product development strategy in far too many companies today. Cheng and Yang
(2019) liken a developing company without an innovation strategy to waging a war without a military
strategy. This often leads to ad hoc decisions that are independent of each other and based solely on the
product's own merits without regard to its impact on the company's other project portfolio. The benefits
of a product development and innovation strategy include that the company's product development
investment is more closely linked to the company's overall strategy. This highlights the real impact of
product development on the company's performance. The attitude towards development and marketing
costs for new products is changing and the risk of a cut resource supply is reduced (Gutierrez-Gutierrez,
Barrales-Molina and Kaynak 2018). A product development strategy is a basic prerequisite for idea
generation, project screening, portfolio management, market focus and resource allocation (Cheng and
Yang 2019).

Studies have shown that companies that use a formalized development process place high on
the list of companies' success indices. Even higher on the list are companies that coordinate long-term
business strategy and product development planning (Bashir, Papamichail and Malik 2017). Cooper
(2019) describe a study by Booz-Allen and Hamilton that the developing companies that succeed best
with their development and launch of new products are those who clearly and explicitly start from the
company's goals and strategies in their product development and possess a well-defined innovation and
product development strategy. The strategy that has proven to give the best results is the differentiated
strategy, a technologically sophisticated, aggressive and focused strategy with a strong market
connection.

The goals of this strategy are the penetration of fast-growing markets with high potential for
differentiated products with high price and high quality. One example is Porsche, currently the most
profitable carmaker. The second best strategy from a performance point of view is the low-budget and
conservative strategy. This strategy is characterized by low consumption of development resources and
competitor-imitating and undifferentiated product development. Development always takes place on
the basis of the company's existing resources and knowledge, and the finished product must, as far as
possible, fit into the company's existing product lines and production (Mauerhoefer, Strese and Brettel
2017).

SWOT Analysis

One of the most effective ways to analyze a given business field is that of a SWOT analysis. This
analysis has four segments each of which evaluate a different external factor. These include
opportunities, threats, weaknesses, and strengths wherein the first and second focus much more so on
the internal conditions of the organization whereas the latter two focus on the external environment
that the organization is generally exposed to (Gutierrez-Gutierrez, Barrales-Molina and Kaynak 2018).
With regards to Ittehad Chemicals Limited, the company’s strengths lie in the fact that it has a long
history behind it, the fact that it is available readily and easily to the local market, the amount of
resources available to the organization for the purposes of product development, the fact that it has a
low price on its products and the fact that the company is able to offer employment to numerous
individuals who are likely to be its customers at later times (Bashir, Papamichail and Malik 2017).

In terms of weaknesses, it should be noted that the company’s recent sales have fallen over
time, mainly due to the impact of the current pandemic. Additionally, even whilst the company has
operated in the market for a number of years, its overall brand is not one that is easily recognizable and
thus the company lacks industry insight and knowledge that could further its consumer awareness and
brand recognition (Cooper 2019).

In terms of the opportunities available to the organization, it should be understood that the
company has a lack thereof competition given the fact that most of the valuable chemical businesses
within Pakistan are based within the state of Karachi (Cheng and Yang 2019) and thus, the company is
able to operate without considerable direct competition. Moreover, as its business also focuses on the
chemical industry, the company can further expand its exporting capabilities thereby catering to a larger
consumer base and furthering its own internationalization.

In terms of threats, other Pakistan-based organizations that focus on the chemical industry are
likely to harm the organization. Moreover, these competitors can easily utilize a negative approach to
publicly criticize the company thereby further reducing its customer base.

Product Portfolio

The company’s products include the following:

 Sodium Hydroxide, also regarded as Caustic Soda, something that when dissolved in water develops
a strong alkaline solution. This compound either in a liquid, solid, or gaseous form is caused by ICL.
This is hydroscopic in its solid form and thus it is able to absorb moisture from the air easily. Herein,
this moisture is segmented into containers that are airtight.
 Second to Sulphuric Acid, hydrochloric acid, has a number of diverse uses when it comes to
manufacturing synthetic and industrial chemicals. This acid is a water-based hydrogen chloride gas
solution and the gas itself is attained by hydrogen and chlorine’s burning.
 As a single material on which several chemicals’ production primarily focuses, chlorine is utilized in
ninety five per cent of all agrochemical industry yields, eighty-five per cent of all pharmaceutical
products, and sixty per cent in all chemistry at the commercial level.
 A highly water soluble compound, Zinc Sulphate Monohydrate is, itself a material that is powdery,
white, and free flowing.
 Calcium Chloride is a product that is created by following international material grade required
specifications.

Product Offering

In terms of services and product offering, the company’s products are appropriate for industrial
chemical uses and given the design, function, and coloring of its products, the company is able to easily
further its own availability access, quality, and pricing. Ittehad Chemicals Limited’s products are durable
and strong value services, continued consumer contact, and consultation services.

Portfolio Management

Portfolio management includes decisions regarding resource supply, priorities and settlement /
further development for ongoing product development projects. Portfolio management is also a direct
strategy-extending activity as today's new product investments determine tomorrow's market position.
Finally, the activity includes optimization of resource investment balances between high-risk and low-
risk projects, stability- and growth-oriented projects, as well as short-term and long-term projects
(Gutierrez-Gutierrez, Barrales-Molina and Kaynak 2018). Portfolio management is a dynamic decision-
making process where a company's list of ongoing product development projects is constantly updated
and revised. In this process, projects are evaluated, selected and prioritized. Existing projects can be
accelerated, phased out or re-prioritized (Hosseini, Soltani and Mehdizadeh 2018).
 There are many elements that make the management of the product portfolio a relatively
complicated task, which is illustrated by the fact that the projects in the portfolio are at different stages
in the development process that must be taken into account in the distribution of resources. The status
and priority for projects in the portfolio is constantly changing due to changed market conditions and
other market-influencing information. Resource supply of a new project can lead to resources having to
be taken from another. Redistribution of resources is never completely seamless (Cooper 2019).

Portfolio-driven product development can lead to a number of benefits for a company;

maximizing product development performance, efficient and appropriate distribution of scarce
resources, merging project selection processes and company strategy, achieving the right balance
between short-term and long-term development projects and high- and low-risk projects, better
communication regarding priorities vertically and horizontally within the company, and a higher degree
of objectivity process and consistency (Mauerhoefer, Strese and Brettel 2017). It is important, during the
prioritization of product development projects, to focus on profitable projects and dare to phase out
less profitable ones. A company's priorities for ongoing product development projects must be based on
strategic alignment, opportunity for increased profit, opportunity for increased market share, degree of
product differentiation and technological progress for each product development project.

Companies need to be able to manage and get an overview of all their development projects,
which can be done by visualizing these with different types of diagrams. Furthermore, the balance is
another criterion that is important in a product portfolio, and which according to Bashir, Papamichail
and Malik (2017) is based on the fact that there is a balance between long and short projects, high-risk
and low-risk projects and new respectively old projects that are under development. A short-term
project means projects that are not particularly technologically advanced, while a long-term project is
often based on a more innovative and technologically advanced product. The idea behind striving for a
balanced product portfolio is that the company avoids “putting all the eggs in the same basket”, thus
minimizing the commercial risk (Hosseini, Soltani and Mehdizadeh 2018). In new strategic product
development, this model is useful and together with the valuation model (NPV) it provides a good basis
for evaluating which direction the company should take.

According to Hosseini, Soltani and Mehdizadeh (2018), innumerable parameters and factors aim
at finding a balance among the projects. There are an endless number of different histograms, diagrams
and other models for this purpose, but the time and nature of the projects are the factors that need to
be paid attention to first and foremost. The time required for a project is a decisive factor, no one wants
to invest entirely in only short-term projects while no one only invests in long-term projects.
Furthermore, product developers should strive to spread the launches evenly over the year (Cooper
2019). This arrangement also has a positive effect on cash flow, as resource consumption can be better
distributed over time and the inflow is balanced against the outflow from investments in the various
projects.

Speaker Notes

Slide 1: Introduction

Founded in the year 1962, Ittehad Chemicals Limited is a private company. It was created under
the name of United Chemicals. This organization has a strategically situated factory on the Grand Truck
Road. This factory is strategically situated in such a manner so as to have it be accessible easily from
Lahore to ensure that the company itself as well as those working for it are able to easily conduct their
business. Through the years, this area of Kala Shah Kaku has seen considerable growth and development
with several organizations alongside Ittehad Chemicals Limited establishing their foundations firmly in
the location to further their potential and capability.

Slide 2: Continued…

The area that the company is founded in, Kala Shah Kaku, is one that is vast and spreads across
the Grand Truck Road nearing Gujranwala. This area and its neighboring locations, similar to what has
happened to other areas on the GT, have seen considerable growth with regards to their potential and
economic stability. The recent years have seen considerable educational, economic, and commercial
activity at play within these areas with several townships sprouting up so as to afford themselves
accessibility and ease. This has inevitably furthered these such areas’ potential and shows the economic
prospects that an organization such as Ittehad Chemicals Limited has for the nation at large.

Slide 3: MISSION & Vision

The mission of the company is that of serving customers to make them feel satisfied, ensuring
that it does not negatively impact the environment surrounding its operations, encouraging and
promoting corporate social responsibility through its actions and processes, developing an environment
of work that is able to attract as well as retain highly talented individuals, and focusing the company’s
energy and efforts on effective technology usage.

VISION

Conversely, the company holds the vision that it wishes to become the most talented and
advanced technological organization within the nation whilst functioning as a catalyst that delivers
customers with sustainable products to optimize the possible returns it can offer its stakeholders.

Slide 4: New Product Development

For any organization, it is critical to continuously create new products as each individual product
accompanies its own lifecycle and thus every organization has the chance focus on a set product for only
a given amount of time. Because of this, it is important for organizations to develop new products that
are able to sustain themselves in an ever change market. Although this may be a risky process, it is
important for organizations such as Ittehad Chemicals Limited to ensure that they do not fall behind
their competitors or in terms of profit as doing so may lead to their inevitable demise.

Slide 5: Idea Generation

This process of product development is comprised of several stages, idea generation being one
of them. The current landscape is one that is comprised of a number of environmentally harmful
pollutants. Research on this matter shows plastic pollution is something that has greatly harmed the
world and its inhabitants thereby making it so that the climate itself has come to fall apart. Companies
such as Ittehad Chemicals Limited, ones that focus on chemical manufacturing, have to ensure that their
operations can be conducted in a manner that does not negatively impact the global climate or
environment as a whole. In this sense, it is important for them to utilize technologies and products that
have a minimum environmental impact.

Slide 6: Screening of the Ideas

After ideas are made, it is important for them to be screened. To ensure that the company can
move in a given direction with an idea, the idea’s product development capabilities have to be
evaluated. Furthermore, should Ittehad Chemicals Limited not comprehend the needs that its customers
have then it is likely that the organization will be unable to best utilize the resources available to it. This
would make the development of any given product by it subpar thereby diminishing the possibility of
success.

Slide 7: Test Marketing

This stage involves a practical environment of marketing wherein the product and the marketing
initiative are introduced. There are several categories of test marketing but it is important to focus only
on a single one to ensure that the process can take place in an efficient and effective manner. For
Ittehad Chemicals Limited, standard test marketing would be appropriate. This type of marketing
involves the production of flyers, online advertisements, seminars that inform individual consumers
about the product at hand, and billboards to mass advertise the product itself.

Slide 8: Product Development

The process of developing a product involves the creating of various physical models of a
product to ensure that it is one that can be easily utilized. In this sense, product development, as a
process, has to be systematic, team-based, and focused on the customer. In this regard, it is significant
for the team in charge of researching and developing the product to be able to gather information
regarding contemporary market demands and trends so as to attain a fundamental idea of what the
product itself should be as a whole.

Slide 9: Continued…

It is important for companies to have a product development strategy that links the
organization’s general business strategy with product development. A developing company without
innovation is one that wages a war without a military strategy. Generally, not having a sufficient strategy
can be an ad hoc approach that makes it so that the basis of product develop, idea generation,
screening, etc. cannot be conducted. Thus, having a product development strategy is critical to ensuring
success.

Slide 10: SWOT Analysis – Strengths and Weaknesses

Ittehad Chemicals Limited’s main strengths include the fact that it has a history of being a local
company behind it, that the company is one that is readily available to its customers, that it has a
sufficient amount of resources available to it to develop products for its customers, the fact that it offers
employment to a considerable number of individuals, and that its products are affordable for the local
market.
 In terms of weaknesses, the company’s sales have fallen due to the pandemic, it does not have a
well recognized brand name, and the fact that the company lacks sufficient consumer recognition and
awareness.

Slide 11: SWOT Analysis – Opportunities and Threats

With regards to opportunities, the company has a number of them including the fact that it is
one of the most valuable Punjab-based organizations with regards to its field, that it is able to operate in
a market that does not have direct competition for it, that it can further its internationalization efforts to
improve its position on the global market, and that the organization can utilize various means of
expansion to further its capability.

With regards to threats, the company faces a number of them including the fact that it is
vulnerable to negative criticism and that it does not have a stable position in the market it operates.

Slide 12: Product Portfolio

The company has a highly diverse, chemical industry focused portfolio of products, which
include calcium chloride, zinc sulphate monohydrate, hydrochloric acid, caustic soda or sodium
hydroxide. Each and all of these are valued and important products on the market – ones that most
consumers require thus making the company and appropriate and acceptable one within the chemical
industry.

Slide 13: Product Offering

The products of the company are meant for industrial purposes and are designed in such a
manner so as to be focused on the average industrial consumer or business. The products that the
company offers are ones that accompany consultation services, consumer contact, value, and durability
in their usage. All of these combine in order to further the organization’s capability as a provide of
chemical solutions. Additionally, the added customer service that the organization offers helps improve
its position considerably by placing it on the forefront of the market.

Slide 14: Portfolio Management

The management of a portfolio involves a number of activities including resource supply,

settlement, priorities, and product development projects. This is a direct strategy-extending activity and
helps companies focus on the future of their products. In of itself, this is a dynamic process of making
decisions that has a list of the ongoing projects of product development of a company be continually
revised and updated. This process then helps companies ensure that their products are managed
appropriately and that no single product is given excess focus over another thereby neglecting its
capability and market potential.

Slide 15: Continued…

Product development that is driven by a company’s portfolio can lead to several advantages for
the organization including but not limited to attaining a mix between low risk and high risk projects and
long and short term developments, maximizing the performance of developing a product, appropriate
and effective resource distribution, and improved consistency and objectivity process. Organizations
thus have to be able to maintain and attain a comprehensive overview of their development initiatives
so as to understand which product is successful and should be focused on more so and which ones have
to be phased out.
Introduction

The creative process is one where ideas are communicated, generated, and developed (Reeves,
Xyrichis and Zwarenstein 2018). Herein, a given idea can be understood as being the fundamental
concept of thought, which can be abstract, concrete, or visual. The creative process, or ideation, is
comprised of a cycle of thought which begins at the process of innovation and leads into the process of
actualization (Driskell, Salas and Driskell 2018). Whilst the process itself can be conducted as a crow or
as an organization, it can also take part as an individual as well. Due to this, ideation is critical not only in
the designing process but also in the process of conducting a given type of task or duty.

In reflecting back on the project conducted for task 1, I can say that the team as a whole lacked
a considerable amount of functionality as well as appropriate and suitable communication. In this sense,
whilst individual team members were delegated duties to ensure that the project could easily be
conducted with each part managing a different aspect of the project itself, it was found that this was
often not the case and each individual member, due to the not assigning of a leader, had to engage in
continued communication with one another to motivate them. When receiving the assignment and
being arranged into a group dynamic, the team had taken part in communications where the aim was
that of ensuring that the team would be able to equally designated duties and responsibilities.

However, the team’s lack of experience and collaboration capabilities made it so that this
communication was surface level and did not take into account several important factors that could
impact the work conducted on the project, particularly that certain time-intensive tasks should be
assigned more resources and less-time intensive ones should not be prioritized at the start. Being unable
to do so meant that the team had to befall a number of stress factors and have their abilities limited
considerably.

In of itself, teamwork has to be an effort that is collaborative between a handful of individuals

attempting to achieve a common task or goal in the most efficient and effective way possible (Driskell,
Salas and Driskell 2018). This notion is viewed as being important to team frameworks and the
fundamental effective teamwork requirement is that of having a team of an adequate size (Reeves,
Xyrichis and Zwarenstein 2018). Whilst the size of a given team can vary based on the objective at hand,
the context itself is what is important, Teams have to be at least of between two to one hundred
members and function based on fixed rules and regulations that push the team forward.

The team members mainly for the purposes of saving time as well as ensuring that the members
were not exposing one another to possible spreads of COVID-19. For this purpose, a variety of
applications and platforms were used including Zoom and WhatsApp. This made it so that there was a
sense of dysfunctionality amongst the team in terms of which platform should be used to communicate.
Additional use of electronic mail further exacerbated this dysfunctionality. However, with time and
consistent effort, the members of the team were able to arrive at a negotiation process wherein the
current performance as well as task achievement was reviewed against the time taken for the project to
be completed. Upon appropriate review and the efforts put in by each member of the team, it was
found that there was a sense of dysfunction that required resolution. In particular, it was decided that
Zoom would be utilized for the purposes of communication and cooperation whereas electronic mail
would be utilized for file transfer processes.
 Overall, through this, as well as time management processes now being in place and duties not
being delegated to individual members rather each member sharing a portion of each duty made it so
that the team made faster progress toward the achievement of their goals and duties. The quality of the
final presentation was the outcome of the efforts placed in by each individual member of the team and
thus was of the highest possible quality that each individual team member could offer. The team had
also conducted additional research into how the presentation should have constructed through the
selection and evaluation of online resources as well as through an assessment of the presentation itself.
This made it so that the team could evaluate the presentation and assess possible discrepancies and
ensure that the overall quality was one that was consistent and well-rounded.

Conclusion and Recommendations

In hindsight, it can be stated that the communications that took place between the team
members at the start should have been better rounded and in a manner that was more consistent and
delegated team functions, duties, and processes of communication so as to ensure that discrepancies
would not arise later on. Moreover, it would have been of particular significance to decide on a set
platform in order to ensure that communication between all members would be conducted in an easy
and efficient manner rather than have each member of the team scramble together and use different
platforms at different times. Additionally, the allocation of a timeframe for group activities and tasks
would have been something that would benefit the team in particular and furthered its ability to
cooperate as a team as well as be productive as a whole. In terms of recommendations, there are a
number of recommendations that could be offered to the team in particular during the start of the
project. These are elaborated upon in the following

Understand Collaboration’s Purpose

Individuals on the team should be informed of why they are together and what the aim of the
collaboration itself is (Sambrook, et al. 2018). This means aiding individual team members in
comprehending the purpose of a given project, its meaning for them and for those that they are
conducting it, and the methods and processes that would be involved for the team to achieve the best
outcome possible. When individual members comprehend the goals and purpose of the team, they end
up visualizing their own purpose and how they should contribute to the team (Sambrook, et al. 2018).

Define Work Goals

Once individuals comprehend a given project’s primary objectives, they have to be informed of
the time required for each goal. This aids in ensuring that each individual is aligned with the purpose of
the project and the team itself begins to function in a collaborative manner (Landon, Slack and Barrett
2018). By establishing goals that individual members of the team have to achieve, individuals are able to
further their capabilities thereby improving the team as a whole (Reeves, Xyrichis and Zwarenstein
2018).

Defining Team Member Roles

Each individual on the team can provide a given strength to it and collaboration in this regard
should focus on ensuring that such strengths are placed at the forefront with the weaknesses of
individual members being overlooked or compensated for by other team members to ensure that the
team does not waste time and instead capitalizes on their strengths.

Establish the Collaboration is Expected

Although this may seem obvious, it is important to ensure that all team members are aware that
they have to collaborate with one another to further the productivity as well as objective achievement
capability of the team at large. Although some individuals on the team may prefer to work along, it is
important to ensure that these individuals are working toward the goals of the team rather than
themselves and establish that a collaborative culture is at play wherein the team depends on each
individual component of itself (Driskell, Salas and Driskell 2018).

Identify Team Strengths

When working in teams, it is important to find the strengths of each individual and ensure that
these participants cooperate with one another in a way that the make up for the weaknesses of their
teammates whilst also ensuring that they can focus on their own strengths as well. Appropriate and
accurate collaboration depends on collectively working toward a shared goal rather than focusing on
one’s own weakness (Landon, Slack and Barrett 2018).

Conclusion

In conclusion, it can be stated that the team itself had placed in a considerable amount of effort
but much of this effort at the start was one that went to waste given the lack of experience that the
team had with regards to collaborating with one another and structuring such a collaboration. In this
sense, the above recommendations highlight the best possible ways to conduct a team project and
ensure that all members of a team are helpful in ensure that the project itself and their efforts are
focused on a set matter. Although the team was able to successfully conduct the project they were in
charge of, this was only possible after they had faced several issues and learned how these issues were
impacting the team as a whole that suitable solutions were found.
 Bibliography

Bashir, N., Papamichail, K.N. and Malik, K., 2017. Use of social media applications for supporting new
product development processes in multinational corporations. Technological Forecasting and
Social Change, 120, pp.176-183.

Cheng, C. and Yang, M., 2019. Creative process engagement and new product performance: The role of
new product development speed and leadership encouragement of creativity. Journal of
business research, 99, pp.215-225.

Cooper, R.G., 2019. The drivers of success in new-product development. Industrial Marketing

Management, 76, pp.36-47.

Driskell, J.E., Salas, E. and Driskell, T., 2018. Foundations of teamwork and collaboration. American
Psychologist, 73(4), p.334.

Gutierrez-Gutierrez, L.J., Barrales-Molina, V. and Kaynak, H., 2018. The role of human resource-related
quality management practices in new product development. International Journal of Operations
& Production Management.

Hosseini, A.S., Soltani, S. and Mehdizadeh, M., 2018. Competitive advantage and its impact on new
product development strategy (Case study: Toos Nirro technical firm). Journal of Open
Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 4(2), p.17.

Landon, L.B., Slack, K.J. and Barrett, J.D., 2018. Teamwork and collaboration in long-duration space
missions: Going to extremes. American Psychologist, 73(4), p.563.

Mauerhoefer, T., Strese, S. and Brettel, M., 2017. The impact of information technology on new product
development performance. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 34(6), pp.719-738.

Reeves, S., Xyrichis, A. and Zwarenstein, M., 2018. Teamwork, collaboration, coordination, and
networking: Why we need to distinguish between different types of interprofessional practice.

Sambrook, R., Lewis, C., Alfter, B., Kayser-Bril, N., Koch, A. and Clements, J., 2018.  Global teamwork: The
rise of collaboration in investigative journalism. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.