Reflection

We reflected on two aspect of our teamwork during the first quarter, namely the meetings and the roles within the group. Over all, we are satisfied about our teamwork and we are aiming for the same collaboration in quarter 2. 

Meetings:

In total we had 6 official team meetings. At all the meetings, everyone was present. We feel pretty satisfied about the outcome of our meetings. They were efficient and made everything we needed to do in the future very clear. In our meetings, Julius and Caitlin took the lead most of the time. Especially when everybody was talking at once, one of them took the lead, this way we did not deviate much from our main points. Also, after every meeting, either Julius or Caitlin posted the ‘to-do list’ on our facebook-page, so that there was no confusion on what we needed to do for our next meeting. However, we still had some minor troubles with finishing our ‘to-do’s’ for our next meeting. This was mostly because of individual time-management and organisation. This is something we definitely need to improve on as a group and as individuals. We experienced how annoying and frustrating it can be for others when you hand in work too late, so we learned that we have to improve our time-management to avoid conflicts in the future. However, we also learned that if we want to create a good atmosphere in our group, we have to respect different kind of working-styles. If we do not respect that, that will lead to conflict in the future, which we want to avoid. So all by all, for our next meetings we will make some changes in our action plan. We will prepare our meetings even better, so that our meetings can be even more efficient. We will have a meeting at the beginning of the quarter to organize everything and make a timetable. That way we know what is expected from us in the first week already, so that we have plenty of time to work on the group assignments. We will still have 2 leaders for every meeting, because we experienced this positively. We will discuss whether we change the leading roles or not, at the beginning of the next quarter. Also, we will, as a group, be stricter on handing in work too late. As a group, we will try to stimulate every single member to manage their own time as efficient as possible, to avoid handing in work too late.

Roles and task distribution

As you can see on the website as well, we divided roles and tasks. Even though we have had a general chairman, secretary etc., we pointed out a different leader per group assignment. For instance, Mike was responsible for the group website and was in charge of making sure everybody did their task for this specific assignment. We felt like this was the best way to structure and organize our group and we are satisfied with the outcome of this structure. It saved us all a lot of time, because now only one person sorts out the details of the assignment instead of every single member of our group. However, we found out that not every person is as strict as the next when it comes to time management and looking at the marking scheme. This last mentioned was an obstacle in our progress within the written assignment. We initially had written about different topics than those we were going to be marked on. Therefore we needed to change our whole structure for this particular assignment and it took more time than expected. However, we learned from it, namely to have the marking scheme next to us when we divide our tasks. In the future, every single member in our group will do this. For the assignments for the next quarter, we will divide the tasks the same way we did this quarter. We will however, set rules about how to divide tasks to make it even more efficient. Also, we will set deadlines for the leader to sort everything out for an assignment; otherwise it will probably be done at the last moment, which causes stress and irritation by other members of the group. We learned that working with deadlines creates pressure and some members of our group need pressure to perform. We will decide at the beginning of the quarter if we are going to change the general roles (chairman, secretary etc.).