I interviewed a program administrator of a study abroad in China who had responsibility over the financial planning and management for the trip. The financial management was very problematic.
Problem: Essentially, she couldn’t withdraw the necessary money needed to fund housing and travel expenses for the students. Chinese banking regulations and BYU accounting rules combined to make it difficult to pay their business partners.
Solution: This manager has the same philosophy as our guest speaker. There are problems, large problems but good management can prevent complete failures. She ended up using personal money, having the traveling professor use the cash from the hosting university’s salary, both went daily to take out maximum deposits (than carried large sums of cash), woke up at 3am several days to speak with BYUs offices to get clearances for different expense procedures, ect
What I learned: I learned that double-checking information sometimes isn’t enough. They were promised they could do cash advances but they were not allowed to once they got there. Double checking is just making sure the person you are talking two understands your question and reaffirms their answer. Triple checking may be a better philosophy. To triple check, after double checking, ask the same questions to a few other employees to make sure you get the same story. This would compensate for problems of incompetence. Preparation could have avoided this problem.
A second lesson I learned is that monetary savings aren’t always the best solution. Part of their problem is they went with the cheapest business partners. They ended up having some of the most difficult financial rules. When managing traveling, convenience or insurance should get more attention and raw cost shouldn’t always be the dominant weight.
The final lesson I learned was that, while we “should never, ever be surprised”, when problems happen, we must be flexible and take responsibility quickly (personal loss of time and convenience in her example) in order to avoid a problem/hurdle/obstacle from turning into an irreversible, abject failure.
