Team Dynamics
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Team Work
By Chi Jinchi
Our group is working on the project for the Boeing company. There are nine people in our group, I think our group is the biggest group ever in ME 416. It sounds good when there are nine people in a group, but not so, sometimes nine people could give negative effects for the project. In order to finish the project completely and on time, we have to spent more time and energy to achieve our project, especially group leader. Fortunately, our group work hard and we made everything work out.
First problem is that our group members split in two different section of the class, there are three in the morning section, and six in the afternoon section. We can not work together during the class time. To overcome this problem, we decided to have meeting every Wednesday, if necessary, we schedule Tuesday and Thursday for group meeting sometimes. We also keep writing email to keep in touch with group, also provide group members’ phone number, in case someone don’t check email often. Bryce write email to everyone to set up the meeting time and make sure everyone can make it, not the time only available for few of us. Due to the nine people group, we usually have a lot of ideas to share with group, we have to spend more time to listen and analysis each other’s idea. It’s good that all group members are welling to accept each other’s idea. And we always split the work into several subgroups, we don’t give too much pressure on individual person. That can make every single work to get done quickly and more accurate.
Due to I am a international students, sometime I have to spent more time to understand what people say and what’s going on with the project. It’s not easy for me to understand 100% of whole project, but all group members have patient with me. So I am still doing alright in this project. I’ve also learned how to work in a big group such as our group, to listen everybody’s idea, don’t just say “no” if you reject other’s idea, tell them what you think about that. Also give people some feedback and admire. That will help the group to go smoothly.
Team Success
By Jayson Eleccion
Since the beginning of the semester myself and eight other members have been working on a project for the Boeing Company. By working with so many members I've noticed in order to succeed there needs to be team chemistry and an organizational structure. Without either of these it would be very hard to achieve a common goal involving nine individuals.
Having team chemistry creates an environment where everyone is comfortable with everyone. This is very important because it allows communication to open. Ideas, solutions, and concepts flow much easier and faster when everyone is on the same page trying to get to one common point, rather than everyone trying to go in their own direction.
It is also important to have a good structure. Having a team leader or multiple leaders, one for each section (morning and afternoon) should be determined early. This way someone would be in charge of delegating work and letting people know when deadline are and what needs to be done.
Working in a large group can sometimes be difficult but the work itself may not be the problem, it’s having nine individuals that can sometimes cause problems. To eliminate any scheduling, personality, or intangible problems it would be good to have a good structure and team working skills.
Narrowing Your Group
By Kelli Dahlquist
Group projects can be very difficult when you have more than two people involved, especially senior design projects because everyone is so busy with other things trying to graduate. If you are assigned a large project and your group has trouble meeting together to get things done or has trouble carrying out tasks on their own you need to think about narrowing your group early.
By narrowing you group I mean splitting it into two parts. Assign two people one part and the other two people the other portion, but still talk about it and approve each other’s designs. This way you can have people work together that have non-conflicting schedules and the work has a better chance of being completed on time and it will be of better quality. Our senior design group made the mistake of not splitting up the tasks sooner and had to hurry towards the end of the project. Make sure and run these things by your project manager before and make sure it is ok.
I recommend splitting the group to get things done in a more timely matter and get better quality. Your finished product will be much better and probably have a better chance of working on the first try.
The Dynamics of a Group
By Luna Michael
From working in numerous group projects, I’ve learned that a few skills need to be mastered. Working in a group setting environment requires patience, good listening skills, and flexibility. The patience part comes into play when realizing that everyone works at a different pace. This might mean that some are more motivated than others. While others want to work at slower pace or just leave it up to other members. Or behavioral issues may be a problem. The key here is for everyone to be patient with one another and find a way to work within the group by rising up to the occasion and plan towards the completion of the project.
The best way to allow everyone to contribute their idea is by being a good listener. This might be a good way to identify a person’s strength and how they can apply their skills to the betterment of the project.
Flexibility is needed when there is schedule conflict, and there are a million other things that need to be done. But, for the better interest of the project a group effort is needed. Lunam 09:50, November 14, 2006 (Pacific Standard Time)
Nine Times the Headache
By Jared Haight
Being placed in a group with eight other team members at first seems like a pretty sweet deal. At the time I was thinking to myself, “this should be a breeze, I only have to contribute 1/9th of the group’s project.” Notice how as an engineer I think in fractions of work. Anyways, some of the other poor students have to work in small groups with as few as three or four other students. That would mean that theoretically I would have to contribute roughly half as much in my large group as the other students would in their smaller groups. Needless to say my disposition soon changed.
It became apparent that although my group had more people in it, to complete the required tasks the working efficiency of the group suffered. At any given time there were fewer than nine individual tasks that needed to be completed, which resulted in group members teaming up. Further complicating matters was the fact that coordinating nine busy schedules was difficult if not impossible. Scheduling conference calls and meeting times that suited every member became a task in itself. My group in particular was split up between the morning and afternoon section of the ME 416 lab. Three members including myself attended the morning session and the other six attended the afternoon session. Communication between the two groups was of the highest importance as so the group could stay on task.
The complications of a large group are quite frustrating at first, but throughout the semester the group developed various ways to cope with the group’s shortcomings. The most important and/or relevant advice I can give is to create and distribute a list containing each group member’s name, email address, and cell phone number. This will insure that intra group communication can occur even without access to a computer. In addition, at the earliest available time, sit down and compare schedules to determine what times are available for group meetings. If possible, determine a time during regular business hours to schedule a conference call. General group meeting times can usually be scheduled for later in the evening when class conflicts are a non-issue. I recommend that the general group meeting be held at the same time and on the same day of every week. If done in this fashion, group members are less likely to forget and/or miss meetings. In one of the earlier group meetings the strengths and weakness of each group member should be felt out. Inherently some group members will be better suited to perform solid modeling, finite element analysis, manufacturing, etc. Group members will be more productive if allowed to contribute to the project in areas that they feel comfortable in. Lastly, to increase group efficiency in a split group I suggest that each section, morning and afternoon, elect a liaison that will function to delegate tasks and keep the team heading in the right direction. Following these basic guidelines will help to alleviate the headaches that come as a member of a large group.
What's Your Major?
By Adam Dirkes
Coming into my final semester here at WSU as an undergrad, I knew ME316 was on my course list. For some reason or another, I had not heard much about ME416, and being an MSE major, didn’t know how much help I was really going to be to my group. To compound the issue, after the projects were announced, the most MSE related project did not appeal to me. So I chose to work on a project with Boeing. I soon found out that there was much more to the course then just regurgitating prior mechanical/materials engineering curriculum. During the Boeing visit, it was evident that this was going to be a challenging project. We were given the task of building a manipulator to be used to pull complicated parts from an airplane frame. We were given a tour of the 737 plant, treated to lunch, and sent on our way to design the most sophisticated piece of equipment Boeing had ever seen. Ok, maybe it wasn’t that complicated, but it was a challenging project for sure. On the long drive home from Seattle I sat in the car thinking how I could help on such a technical problem, besides material selection. At his moment I realized that ME416 was not about having the skills to design and produce a product for a customer, but its purpose was to learn the skills necessary to do so. By just being at the Boeing meeting, I was helping the team. At that point, I was in the same boat as everyone else on my team.
My conclusion was further supported when we started writing the needs and metrics. The process is broken down to such a degree that everyone has some valid input. I was able to help write some of the report as well. During the conceptual design process, everyone was required to come up with a design idea. Everyone had some good ideas, and nobody’s designs were ignored. Some of my design ideas were even incorporated into the final concept. This design consisted of a number of sliding and rotating plates to achieve 6 degrees of freedom. During these steps, everyone was not only learning the design process first hand, but also learning to work efficiently in a design team.
So it turns out I have been more help to my team then I thought I would be initially. I have been able to help throughout the project and at this point in the semester we are working on the build process. Overall the project has been more involved then most classes, so if you’re an MSE in Senior design and don’t think you’re going to be able to help on a project, think again!
Communication and Task Delegation
By Joe Grim
Setting out goals and tasks for each group member helps to keep members on task and efficient. Communicating these tasks through basecamp helps everyone know where each person is in their individual processes, and overall where the group stands. Our group had some problems in this area early on. We had made our first initial trip to Genie, our project sponsor, and had laid out a good idea of what needed to be done, and the timelines for everything. We were under the impression that the group would make two more visits, each with half the group attending. The group worked hard on the design of the first part of the system and two of us returned to Genie. The Genie representatives were upset because they expected us all to be there and ended up splitting up the group and assigning the completion of the first design to the pair that came to Genie, and left the design of another part that the group hadn’t yet worked on to the other pair. Our project sponsor was not happy because he was under the impression that only half the group had done anything, and that the whole group was to come to Genie.
After this happened, the pair that split apart from the group began design on the second half of the design process and wrote out specifically what the pair was to accomplish. This same two group members then visited Genie a few weeks later, and proceeded to make significant progress in the completion of the project. After the mishap regarding the group visiting Genie, each twosome began to better lay out specific tasks and who was in charge for each. In retrospect, it seemed that for the first half of the project we had not laid things out specifically to each person, and as a result things were slow to get done. Further dividing up the tasks gave each person something that they were directly responsible for, which increased group accountability and progress. Communication between our group and project sponsor was improved to let them know, via basecamp, who was in charge of what specific tasks, and when they were due. This prevented further mishaps in regards to getting things done, and having group members accountable for specific tasks.
Work Load Division
By Nicole Schatz & Megan Reynolds
Traditionally, ME416 as described by the course prefix is a mechanical engineering class. The project our group was tasked with was finding a replacement material for parts that were corroding, a materials engineering problem. Our group consisted of seven people, two MSE and five ME students, quite the unbalanced team for a strictly material science problem. The issue we had to overcome throughout this project was equally dividing the work that needed to be done.
It took some time to figure out, but the best advice I can think of for future groups who find themselves in a similar situation is to plan. Planning out your activities ahead of time and makes things go much smoother, faster and the work is usually higher quality. Plan out what needs to be done the night before, print off pages for each person and their respective duties, this helped our group tremendously. It removed slacking of some of the group members, and also didn’t leave room for other members to take control of the project because they felt like it wouldn’t get done. When each person had their own specific list of requirements that they needed to accomplish by the end of the day, it gave everyone a better sense of accountability and ownership of the project.