Group Projects
- Gaston Wong
- Jul 22, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 8, 2020
I find myself letting ideas percolate quite often. I'm not the fastest or the most creative writer so I have to give myself time to mull over things.
As a result, I often ask the question, how do I find the perfect balance between exercising my creativity versus producing a more technical and informative but potentially uninteresting piece?
The answer to this question proved to be quite challenging for this capstone project. When you're writing content by yourself, you have full creative freedom and flexibility on how you wish to tackle a project. For a group project, you are no longer the director who gets to make the executive decision. In my personal experience, the lack of trust, communication, engagement, and direction can be detrimental to the success of a project. Often these factors lead to a disconnect among members and create an environment where everyone has their own agenda and work in silos. As a result, frustration is a common occurrence and grades tend to be lower than expected.
My capstone consists of 12 individuals from various backgrounds, faculty, and personalities. For many, this can be quite daunting as collaborative work can be increasingly difficult as the number of team members rises. With everyone having to shift gears and adjust to the new normal of working or studying remote, miscommunication and lack of communication were more frequent. Team members that were motivated to churn out content quickly would make decisions and change the content of other members before consulting with the original creator. This created a bit of frustration and annoyance among team members. Although not entirely ideal, I honestly prefer having team members that are ambitious and showing initiative compared to someone who chooses to put in minimal effort and coast on a school project.
So how did we prevent further conflict for this project?
The team agreed to schedule weekly meetings to ensure everyone was on the same page and had a strong understanding of creative direction.
Subgroups were created for each section to improve clarity, reduce redundancy, and to ensure there was even workload distribution among members. They would coordinate schedules for internal meetings in addition to the weekly team meetings.
Members were expected to communicate, provide insights and recommendations on how the material should be covered before making the change.
Moving forward, the improvement in transparency made content creation and edits much more effective as there were fewer duplicate content throughout the book. Engagement rose as everyone had internal deadlines within their subgroups and for the weekly team meetings. Although we had a couple of early hiccups, the team quickly addressed this issue through genuine discussion and ultimately improved the group dynamic. This is arguably one of the best teams I've ever had the opportunity to work with on a school project. Everyone understood their role and contributed equally without any trouble.
This blog post is not meant to attack my group members or their character but rather to document my experience and challenges that we've experienced along the way and how we overcame it.
If you like to follow my journey with the IMC Open Source capstone project, click on the links below.
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