Student Experience - Summer Program Business Project

As part of the University of Adelaide's International Student Summer Program, groups of students were given the opportunity to participate in a six-week program where they worked on a real-life consultancy project for a South Australian business, community organisation, or government entity.

This article was written by Team 17, the group of students taking part in the Summer Program Business Consultancy Project with OpSys. 

Team 17 is a diverse group from different academic and cultural backgrounds, studying a variety of programs including engineering, cyber security, project management, construction management, and marketing. The team consists of:

• Barry, Bachelor of Civil Engineering
• Dhrisya, Master of Cyber Security Management
• Jemy, Master of Cyber Security Management.
• Ron, MBA specialising in Marketing.
• Jerome, Client Liaison, double degree in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. 
• Aman, Project Manager, Master of Construction Management
• Sanjay, Project Manager, Master of Applied Project Management (Project Systems).

The Orientation went well, and we had a great head start on the do’s and don’ts, as well as the overall direction and structure of the project. Everyone got to know each other, and it was the start of not only a successful project but also a great learning experience for all team members.

We started the project with a series of introductory workshops. The whole process of the summer business project, the code of conduct, and the methods of working as a team were explained to us before we met other team members and introduced ourselves. As a team, we also assigned roles and responsibilities to each member and selected our project managers and client liaison. It was a challenging process for us since we had not done it before, but we also felt excited as it could be very rewarding.

We were then invited to visit the headquarters of OpSys in Adelaide, who gave us a tour of the company followed by a presentation. After the introduction to our project and the cyber security industry, we couldn’t wait to start researching. We decided to hold weekly meetings with our mentor David Lewis to report our progress and seek advice from him. In the meantime, we had internal team meetings for discussion and collaboration.

In our first team meeting, we brainstormed some ideas and what we could do with limited time and resources and came up with the following milestones:

• Identifying and analysing the local cyber security training market in Adelaide, particularly small to medium enterprises (SME).
• Writing a project plan to lay out what we were going to do in this project and the objectives, which will be approved by our client later.
• Using SWOT and PESTLE analyses to conduct market research and compare and evaluate the companies we previously identified.
• Evaluating the information we found and consolidating it into the project report.

Once we had completed the tasks above, we gave a presentation to Opsys on our findings to conclude the project.

The Summer Program Business Consultancy Project gave us the opportunity to gain corporate experience with a real company. OpSys are incredibly forward-thinking and are constantly looking for methods to solve problems creatively. We found the culture at OpSys to be remarkable. It was a great honour to be surrounded by these intelligent people over the summer, and we used this opportunity to learn as much as we could from each person.

Our team was able to develop a cyber security training market and competitor analyses for their business. This experience certainly gave us a feeling of confidence and a better understanding of workplace etiquette, and in future we know we will feel more comfortable in that environment. We not only honed our research and practical skills, but also gained knowledge, insight, and friendship.