Experiences and gains from the EMS project exercise

    Apart from the obvious practical experience that this exercise gave to us (i am pretty sure most of us where new to the subject), it was really interesting on a personal level due to the team i was assigned. We were 'in charge' of the environmental department of the company and from the discussion that followed our project it looked as if we had fallen into a well-known 'trap'. The one where as an environmental department, we try to centralize all responsibilities of the system around us and thus even making the work of other systems redundant. We were shown that this strategy is very effective as it makes the work load inexorably big. We were even confronted with the fact that most companies don't have environmental departments, but choose to use these environmental systems and allocate the responsibilities through the company. That was a bit of surprising but educating at the same time. Overall it was a fun experience as almost all the group assignments we do in this master. I think apart from practical experience they help in coordination and cooperation, two important pillars of the SSPM course (in my opinion at least).