It’s December 2019. Mariah Carey’s song, “All I Want for Christmas is You,” is playing in the background as we prepare to end the year. Many of us also are starting to rewrite New Year Resolutions that we know we will never finish, again. Although the list remains relatively the same, we would never imagine the drastic changes ahead of us. Fast forward to March 2020, while some of us are still waking up from all of the New Year festivities, a pathogen quickly swept through the globe. The pandemic is here. Everyone’s lives took a quick turn.
No individual, business, or country is immune to the negative impacts of COVID-19. Prior plannings and strategies were all thrown out of the window as companies pivot through uncertainties. Mondavi is no exception and is hit especially hard by this unprecedented event.
Mondavi Center, one of the oldest performing arts centers on the west coast, is faced with tremendous pressure to quickly adjust and adapt to the new world. They have financial burdens and difficulty to maintain performances for audiences and performers due to season cancellation. In response, they launched different products and revised their services as quickly as possible.
As part of the UC Davis Practicum project this year, I was selected to participate in helping Mondavi. The challenge that we are facing is that the project scopes of this year’s practicum project have changed dramatically. Mondavi notified us that business decisions are changing every day as circumstances and regulations change. We quickly shifted our focus and effort to provide the best service possible to our clients. We are no longer a group of students working on a school project. We pivoted ourselves as consultants to Mondavi to help solve their problems.
But how are we doing it, you might ask?
Initially, our team of 4 students was extremely concerned about the uncertainties. We thought that we would not do meaningful work since the project plan has changed dramatically. Our original work plan was to conduct quantitative analysis in different areas of the business. Now we have no data to work with due to season cancellation. However, we were not ready to give up just yet.
According to an article by Deloitte, COVID-19: Confronting uncertainty through and beyond the crisis,
the best way to tackle ambiguity is to embrace and confront it head-on.
We held multiple sessions with Sarah, our point of contact at Mondavi, to brainstorm and discuss how ongoing changes have impacted our deliverables. We considered the uncertainties at hand and the different options that we can do to help. We changed our objectives to providing Mondavi with optimized seating options post-COVID and redefined criteria for seat priorities. At our quarterly meeting, we presented our initial findings for two key deliverables just in time. We were given positive feedback and thumbs up to explore further with these two analyses. These findings will provide the Mondavi team with more data to work with and strategize their reopening plans after the Winter Break.
A snapshot of what we’ve done is listed below. In figure 1, we revised and came up with a new point system to help Mondavi prioritize their customers since a few existing packages are no longer available. In figure 2, we presented how Mondavi can optimize their seating options based on their current seating chart.
We started the quarter with many uncertainties. Our team and Mondavi were able to work out a plan to revise our project scope and work through the ambiguities to help the business. We now have a better understanding and a more clear direction of where to go next. Even though the roads ahead are still blurry, we are looking forward to finishing out the year and checking it off my personal New Year Resolution list.
