Negotiating the brief - Meeting 1

Me and my group members, Jurgen and Jennifer, attended a meeting with James Chatton. Our class was split into 3 groups and the other 2 groups also attended. A guest visitor, Mr Bowles, was also invited.

My Performance


In my group I was chosen as the negotiator. This meant that I had to discuss the possible amendment to the brief that our group had come up with with James Chatton. As this was my first time negotiating a brief I struggled with being persuasive enough to persuade Mr Chatton to agree to my amendment. As a result of this we failed to have our amendment agreed to, although I can take valuable skills and experience for negotiating in the future. I now know that I need to centralise my argument more when trying to negotiate. My argument wasn't focused enough and the points I made were not strong enough to accept. James Chatton did give me feedback saying that in future I need to centralise my points and try to be more persuasive in the way I approach the discussion. He also said that I need to try and make my negotiation more of a win-win situation and that I may have to compromise something in order to get what I want. I also know that I shouldn't give up when my amendments aren't agreed to and to carry on trying to negotiate throughout the discussion. A positive point to my performance was that I did actually participate in the negotiation process, even though my amendment may not have been agreed to.


Group Performance

I think that overall our group wasn't very productive. Although we came up with a possible amendment to the brief, we didn't discuss it in much depth, meaning that when it came to talking about the amendment we proposed it was a big struggle. This created an obvious problem when trying to persuade Mr Chatton to agree to our amendments, leading to him dismissing our idea. I also think that our group could have organised ourselves much quicker. It took us a few minutes to start thinking of ammendments we could choose from, meaning that we didn't have much time to discuss the ammendment. Our group didn't discuss an angle of approach, meaning that when I started negotiating with Mr Chatton I didn't know where to start. When I negotiate in the future I will definately choose my angle of approach before the negotiation process begins. Mr Chatton agreed that as a group we didn't have a good approach to the negotiation, meaning our argument was weak and went off in different directions. This is something I will have to change when negotiating in the future.

Feedback for another group

Group 3, which contained Dale, James D, Andrew and Carl had clearly prepared well for their negotiation. They were the only group which secured a negotiation to the brief there and then and presented a well centred argument.
When Mr Chatton said no to their first request of 3 pages for the sales list they were quick to compromise a little and ask for 2 pages. I think that this helped secure their negotiation as they agreed to a loose leaf paging strategy which Mr Chatton seemed to like.
I could take alot from the way this group worked as they presented their negotiation in a very good way and were clear with what they were going to say before the negotiation begun.

Update so far

So far, I have began to create a Gantt chart, which is one formal planning technique. I planned on creating 2 formal planning techniques but after discussing with my colleagues I decided to only do 1 technique to the best of my ability as I felt that I could make the extra mark up elsewhere. I have created a Gantt chart before so I do have some previous experience, although I will have to view tutorials on youtube to brush up on my skills.

The first meeting I had with James Chatton was to discuss the clients requirements for the brochure. I felt that this meeting was very productive as I found out things such as the required content and colour schemes for the magazine. James Chatton praised me for using my prior business knowledge in discussions and adding a different side of thinking to these discussions.

Attended second meeting with James Chatton to discuss ICT tools available to produce the You Need Cycles brochure.  We discussed all of the hardware and software that we thought were suitable to use when creating the brochure and also possible solutions to these. A negative for the meeting was that it was only 45 minutes long even though we had a lot of things to discuss. This lead to people trying to rush through the meeting and not managing to write down key points that were mentioned. Next time we have a meeting with James Chatton it will be best to ensure that we have enough time to get through everything on the agenda.
Mr Chatton refered us to pages in our ICT booklet and advised us to carry out further reading on brochures. This is something that I will do later today.

Strengths, Weaknesses and Issues of "You Need Cycles" group work.

What worked well

Our group work was very productive. I contributed to the group by writing down the thoughts of myself and my fellow group members meaning while we were thinking of new ideas I was using our time productively by writing down our thoughts.

What didn't work well

One of our group members was absent due to holiday meaning our group was left depleted. We therefore had to work without this members help and ideas leaving a higher workload on the rest of our group. Other than that I think our group was very productive.