Week 3 - Team Work Module

Team Work Module:

Undertaking the teamwork module has allowed me to better reflect upon our newly formed team and how to function effectively as a team throughout the project. I feel it helped me to understand what makes a team effective and how I can apply some of these strategies to our own team. Namely, I learned the difference between groups and teams, and that successful teams collaborate and help one another on their tasks. I believe as a team we should endeavour to help each other where we see fit, and take on roles proactively rather than working individually on our own tasks. In terms of the team lifecycle, I feel it is important to establish objectives and strong operation/communication rules early on. This will ensure everyone is on the same page, and it can better facilitate the work that each team member contributes throughout the semester.

Communication will also be key to the success of the team project. Everyone needs to be on board with what’s going on and what needs to be done, so on top of contact sessions, extra meetings and online communication will be needed. For me I think the biggest challenge is to be able to split tasks evenly and delegate the work equally and based on what skills each team member offers to the project. In order to combat this, the whole team will need to be involved in task delegation and be able to contribute what their preferred roles are, what they are more capable of, what their concerns are etc.

Week’s Progress:

This week was also spent on more brainstorming ideas for the project. In the contact, we went around the class and discussed possible ideas/project directions for different categories i.e educational, games etc. It was interesting to hear the different ideas everyone else were suggesting, and all the different uses you can make out of Trove.

My HistoriFinder idea fit under Other (Location-based historical timeline)

Me, and 4 other of my teammates have settled into our project team ‘Tribu’ and the coming week will involve working towards the team charter, and through this we will pool all our ideas together and come up with our favourite 3 concepts.

Sketch of HistoriFinder for concept cards

There weren’t too many major issues that needed to be overcome this week - mostly brainstorming for ideas and settling in as a team. Each team member discussed their own skills and experience in order to decide which roles and responsibilities they could fulfil towards the project i.e design, development, user testing etc. Overall I feel there are some interesting ideas the team has come up already and the next challenge is to decide which direction to take.