Team Management

If you are working in a team, you should select a leader in your team to lead the project before you start working. This is critical as the leader will overlook the progress of the project and work to direct the team towards the goal. However, this doesn't mean that the person who was chosen as leader should be leader for the whole duration of the project. Changing leaders according to the progess of the project is a viable option to accelerate and improve quality of the result. After you have selected the leader, you should always make sure you know what each member on the team is capable of. A good way to gauge this is through a personality test to determine who should be doing what. This ensures that a member won't get assigned a task that they are not compatible with, as this can result in bad results. A task manager is also advised to make sure that everyone in the team is given tasks and not have anyone doing nothing. And lastly, a secretary to keep a note on all things that happen in the meetings with or without stakeholder.  As an example of this, we had Rui as our leader and Xinyi as our task manager for our team. Though we didn't switch leader with another person during the project, it still went smoothly. 

After establishing all of this, it is also important to have a way of communication outside of meetings. A group chat is recommended but if there are other ways that is also fine. This is to ensure that information can be shared between team members, prevents conflicting work, and save time. For example, if member A was working on a specific function of the software but didn't mention it, member B might also start working on that specific function without knowing that member A was working on it causing two members not working together on the same function and instead wasting a lot of time. 

While working in a team, you might encounter some problems. Some of the problems we encountered with the solutions we made for them include:

• Lack of motivation and goals

At the beginning weeks, because of the excessive work for the leader and lack of creativity, instead of assigning work, group members tried to find their own work to do. However, this led to a problem -- lack of motivation. In addition to this, because the project is a new topic neither of us has ever learnt before, we had to learn a lot. Along with this, we didn't have a good way to check progress. To solve this motivation problem, we followed a new weekly routine guideline. As for progress, we needed to submit something specific as our learning outcome.

• Lack of clear roles and work division

In week 3, Rui, Huey and Axel had a practice interview with the Ph.D. student. During the process of the interview, we found out that Huey was not suitable for the speaker role. However, she was excellent in other fields, for instance, the guidelines about persona. In week 19, Lily couldn't find her position in the team after one month-long winter vacation. To solve this problem, we had to make relevant adjustments. We spent more time getting familiar with each other and tried to find out the best role for each teammate. To find it, we had a personality test (MBTI). Although this isn't the best indicator it was still very helpful for determining who fits what role in the team.

• Lack of communication and collaboration

During the winter vacation, it was difficult to communicate and share the hardware. Because of this, Rui had to do all the work on the system implementation as he was the one holding on to the device at the time. We didn't have a solution to this problem as it was a minor problem in our case, but for a bigger project it might be a major problem. One way to fix this might be to communicate clearly who will be doing what and determining how the hardware can be passed around (if necessary).