Harrow in Business, a business service organisation, was approached by WestFocus University Talent with a view to set up a student or graduate placement. HiB had been recently commissioned to carry out a major survey of the businesses in Harrow and the CUT IT placement scheme, run by University Talent, seemed to match the needs of this project.

In February, Devang Chouhan, studying for MSc Business Computing at the University of Westminster, was appointed to co-ordinate the project.

His project brief had a number of elements:

• To recruit a team of students to do the data collection on PDAs.
• To co-ordinate the data collection and management
• To devise and implement all the project systems, such as timesheets for the students, health and safety provision and data verification.

Anne-Marie Mulgrew, the HiB representative said:
“Devang has had teams of students working out in Harrow doing the collection of data. He has worked incredibly hard - he even has to be told to go home sometimes - and has done a wide range of things. He has employed all the students, from sourcing them via the University Talent website to the actual interviewing and appointments. He has lots of common sense and has devised most of the systems we are using himself. In the first 2 weeks I was more hands on but now I have been able to let Devang get on with it.”

Devang described the challenge of the task:
“So far we have employed 28 students from Brunel, Westminster and Kingston. They do either 4 or 8 hour shifts each day. We have collected data on 3500 businesses and have approximately 1500 still to do.”

He felt that the project was mutually beneficial:
“The experience of working on such a big project has been great. It has exceeded my expectations and has been a wonderful placement. In particular, it has been great to put into practice all the things I learnt during my degree. Overall I would definitely recommend the CUT IT scheme to other students and graduates.”