Day 23: Project Alignment Meeting & Back Office Challenges

🗓️ Date: 5 Oct 2025

📌 Title: Project Alignment Meeting & Back Office Challenges

Task Description

My supervisor invited me to join the iFAST Pay Project Working Group (PWG) meeting, which was held to align timelines and share everyone’s progress. Later, we had a call to catch up on my Backoffice project progress, since my supervisor was working from home. 

In the Backoffice project, most of the work involved tables and data, which felt quite repetitive. I was required to refer to the slides provided by PD to ensure the table columns matched user requirements. However, after refreshing the page, the column content unexpectedly changed, meaning I had to redo the work. This situation was frustrating and affected my productivity, especially because my MacBook was lagging during the process.

Challenges & Solutions

The main challenge was the repetitive nature of the back office work, combined with technical issues. Copying and pasting took longer than expected due to my laptop’s lag, which significantly reduced my efficiency. The sudden change in table content after refreshing the page also caused additional rework. To cope, I tried to stay patient and rechecked the slides and requirements to ensure accuracy before redoing the task.

Key Learnings & Skills Gained

I learned that back office projects can be repetitive and require high attention to detail, especially when handling data-heavy tables. I also learned that technical issues can greatly affect work efficiency and that it is important to manage frustration and stay resilient when unexpected changes occur.

Reflection & Next Steps

Day 23 showed me the reality of working on large data-driven projects where updates and rework are common. Moving forward, I plan to stay more organized by saving work regularly, double-checking before refreshing, and communicating technical constraints to my supervisor if they continue to impact productivity.

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