Friday, January 30, 2015

Good things happen when we work well together!


Working as team to write the report was a good experience. It was very interesting to see the different writing styles and how the report came together.

We started communicating in the forum created for the team report as soon as the forum was opened, and we formed our group even before the course started. We were one of the first teams to be set up, the third one in fact.

Everyone in my team was very up front and clear about their goals for this paper, and about their general abilities. They were up for the challenge, were available for whenever we needed something done for the report, and they opened their homes for our meetings.

We created a Facebook account as soon as the group was formed, so that we could communicate more easily, but we also exchanged emails and text messages. We also had a few Skype sessions and met in person three times. Therefore, communication within our group was excellent!

I don’t believe we played any specific Belbin team roles in our team, but we definitely showed features from some of these roles. We nominated a leader – Nadine – and we identified her as being the “Plant” role. She came up with many ideas for how we should address the objectives for the report and most definitely, when we had an issue with the content of the report at the very end; she came up with a very good solution on how we could fix the issue.

We can say that Nicole was our “Co-ordinator”, she was very good at identifying what had to be done, added it to our minutes for follow ups, and she also helped us to focus in our tasks. Melinda was definitely our “Resource Investigator”, she was the one with really good contacts for the interviews and she organized them very promptly and very efficiently. I believe that I was the “Implementer”, since I am crazy about meeting deadlines and I collected everybody’s ideas and work to put it all together and produce the report.

We worked really well together and we completed all our tasks. The only downside was that we identified, in the very last week before the report was due; that we hadn’t covered the “Ethical” concerns surrounding our topics properly. We realised that we had missed very import points in regards to the ethical questions.

So as a team, we decided that we would change the content of the report slightly to try and address the ethical questions. However, by doing that we disrupted the entire final editing process, and therefore our report was not finished at the highest standard that we planned for. We were all aware there would be a compromise, but we decided to take the risk.

Nonetheless, I believe we achieved a lot in a short period of time, produced a very good report and most of all worked well together…

…just as I was finishing writing this blog, I saw that our grades for the report were already available at the Stream website….We got an “A”!!!!  That is the proof of the good work we did together!!!

Congratulations to my team!! The “A” team!!

 

2 comments:

  1. Hi Ana, we really did have a great team. We all put in so much hard work. I'm glad you had such a good experience for your first university paper and I hope you do well in all the rest of them.

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  2. Thank you Nicole! Wish you all the best for the rest of you studies too!

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