Conclusion

In conclusion, I think backup plan is very important before starting a project because at least there’s a backup if anything happen on the current project. A confirm plan is needed before sharing an idea to the others so that we can go through the project smoothly than changing the ideas all the time, kind of delaying the progress. Besides that, we must be responsible on our roles. We should explore and do more research before making any decision to start on a project so that minor changes are made during the progress than changing the whole idea and visuals like two to three times. We should be more responsible and careful for our own roles in our job in the future so that the same mistakes won’t appear again.

Lastly, try to listen to people’s opinion rather than asking people to listen to yours all the time because there is no “I” in a team, but “us”. I felt that being a leader is not easy but people who are not team learner leader feels that it’s an easy job because they judge it by their eyes without understanding what the leader face and what a leader does when all the problems come in one time. Overall, it’s a good experience for involving in group project.

My action..

What I do in these situations and what would I do if I have to do it again?

As a team learner leader, I’ve asked for suggestion from many peoples on how to make our group to work on better for the first issue from some experiences people like lecturers and friends. The most important points to conduct a creative meeting is be prepared, maintain the focus on what we do, have few but better meeting and always get feedback from others.  I’ve also try to advise my members so that we can work together without leaving anyone behind but it’s failed because of human’s attitude and responsibility on doing work. I also try my best to catch up with the time so that we could have time to troubleshooting and do some minor changes later by making sure my members are working well in the project. However, the work is slightly left out from our timetable because we’re changing the visual styles for times but it doesn’t seem attractive in the end.

After the project, I found that all these situations happened are related with the personality test we did before the team was formed. All of us having different result therefore we ended up having a commotion because some are introverts and some are extroverts yet everyone has their own idea and strengths but I found that Belbin test could somehow mark out the behaviour and what kind of person we are for now and future. I’m an introvert who sense things by thinking and judging, my strength is team worker (co-operative, perceptive and diplomatic. Listens and averts friction) and coordinate (mature, confident, identities talent. Clarifies goals and delegates effectively). I hope I can handle the group to complete the task with my strength by helping and supporting.

I hope these situations won’t happen anymore and I hope in my future I won’t repeat the same mistakes in the future by making sure the project is catching up with timetable as planned so that no delaying and be more responsible, detailed, concentrate and independence on everything. If I have a chance to do it again, I would rearrange the team roles because we actually agree with the roles by listening to everyone’s strength and weakness without exploring their artworks and pass since our group has two newly enter students. It is the biggest mistake to agree of choosing the wrong roles to the wrong people.   

Production Part

I’ve choose Tuckman’s theory which consist of four stages, forming, storming, norming and performing. It helps me to further explain about the development of this project easily.

I would like to explain about the review situation during the project by this theory.  First of all, we form into teams and discuss the possibility of each our roles.

Forming stage

Everyone seems excited to look forward on what to do in the project. We started to sharing ideas to discuss what we can do.

Storming stage

Stress started to appear when we start to push against each other to work on it. For me, it’s actually quite painful with contentious and unpleasant feeling throughout the whole progress because we faced lots of bad situations like lack of cooperation, responsibility and communication. It’s where we all felt frustrated and even feels like separating doing our roles rather than working together with uncooperative people. Maybe it’s the toughest stage for everyone during group project because I know about the usage of the personality test (Belbin test and Myers- Briggs) we did before the team formed is actually for us to know what kind of working behaviour we have and what our strengths is. However, we past this stage together and started to know more about each other. Then in norming stage, we started to realize each other’s attitude and what is our weakness. Some were helpful and trying their best to solve the problems while some started pull down the progress.

Performing Stage

We present our project and where our effort leads. As a team learner leader, I represent my team and try my best to help my team all the time.

Delaying...

Delaying Issue

Our progress delayed from what we planned. Uncooperative people might ruin the work progress. One of my team members love pointing the other member to get the job done without helping or giving advices but rushing and blaming people for delaying the progress. At the same time, all of us having the same projects to do there’re also assignments from other subjects when we’re having the team project.  We should work together when we’re having meeting or discussion. Different things happen in our team because some members run out from the timetable as planned and work on the other projects .It’s unfair for everyone who wants to get the job done but their selfishness makes people felt frustrated.

Everyone is lazy but at least do the best you can to complete the project. Someone rejects to learn new software, Adobe Illustrator to create the visual because he/she is better in flash and Adobe Photoshop but only with using the brush to create everything. It’s fine if using Adobe Photoshop as long as the graphic is nice and attractive but he/she can’t make it nicer. I try to teach the simple way of using illustrator since Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator quite similar but he/she claims that they’re both different software and he/she doesn't know how to use it and ask me to do it myself if I wanted to use Adobe Illustrator. Argh! Then I’ll do the visual for second version and it’s much better than the previous one but later we change the idea because the idea wasn't clear enough. So, I passed back the responsibility to graphic department.

version 2 - design 

Somehow, I feel my graphic leader is lazy to think and contribute in the team…. Sorry to say. She often gives ideas but has no logic. It’s just a sudden popup idea. Everything she do, she wants it easy and super-duper simple by just using the paint brush of Photoshop and Flash. It’s fine if the outcome is nice but NO, the visual comes out imbalance and she doesn’t know how to match colours yet she seems like doesn’t realize the graphic wasn’t interesting while all of us felt not really nice and obviously imbalance for the right and left position. She doesn’t want to sketch out the idea for us so I asked her to sketch out and she showed me faces. Since she doesn’t want to do sketching I try to ask her do mock ups so that we understand what she is trying to say. Ended up she says, she is just following what I want. This is part of conversation we had:

conversation 1

conversation 2

During presentation day, we do not have a proper management during the presentation day. How to welcome the clients to our place? We didn’t manage to attract them with our product by visual nor exterior. Lastly, we do not have a clear presentation path to present to the client about our project and sell it idea to them. 

Lacking of...

I would like to talk about the situation during my teamwork practices project…

During our group meeting and discussion, I found that we’re lack of communication it’s hard to discuss about the project when members unwilling to cooperate together such as playing devices, walking around the area during the meeting. Some of us prefer to work alone rather working in a group because of their own culture of doing work. There’s situation where we try to develop an idea, the original idea will be change into majority changes because some members prefer to use mostly of their idea. Our group faced a dependence situation where some members always hope their job is done by others while themselves is just pointing and judging people’s work. Sharing ideas is good but if too much of idea popping out in one time. I don’t think it’s not really good anymore because it would be messy and hard to make decision. Everyone is active in giving out ideas during discussion but we faced some problem after too many ideas were shared and yet one of us never stop pooping new ideas which doesn’t related with the previous idea we had. The main reason why we have communication problem is because the way we speak to each other. For me, I lost tempered easily but I’ll try my best to speak properly instead of scolding but if someone keeps asking unrelated things other than what we’re discussing, they should get scolded because we’re all busy with our work and you’re talking crap all the time.

Team

We were divided into teams after the test. Since our class has nine students, we were divided into a four and five each team.  My group members are Cynthia Chai, Rachael Ng, Junior Lim and Terence Soo (V-Fiction). Then, we took some times to choose our departments and roles. Each member handle one leader and two assistant roles. This is team roles for all the members:

Team Learner Leader         

Chang Tze Li (me)

Assistant

Cynthia Chai Jia Yan

Rachael Ng

Research Leader                  

Junior Lim

Assistant

Chang Tze Li

Rachael Ng

Graphic Leader                     

Rachael Ng        

Assistant

Cynthia Chai Jia Yan

Terrence Soo

Technical Leader                  

Cynthia Chai Jia Yan

Assistant

Chang Tze Li

Terrence Soo

Logistic Leader                      

Terrence Soo

Assistant

Chang Tze Li           

Junior Lim

Intro

This is a blog about the situation of previous group work I did in the college, “Beyond the Mouse, Behind the Screen”. It is an installation project to practice our teamwork so that we have a based situation of group working after graduated. Therefore, we’re separated into two groups since our class has only nine students.

First of all, we were given task to test our personality on Belbin test and MBTI. Belbin test is invented by Dr. Meredith Belbin, its purpose is to identify people’s behaviour strengths and weaknesses during workplace. It helps to build productive working relationship, develop high performing team, raise self-awareness and personal effectiveness, build mutual trust and aid recruitment processes. Belbin Team roles measure behaviour of an individual. There are nine roles in Belbin Team test, which is plant, resource, monitor, co-ordinators, implementer, completer, teamworkers, shapers and specialist. Here’s the definition of each roles:

·         Plants could be unorthodox or forgetful
·         Resource Investigators might forget to follow up on a lead
·         Monitor Evaluators could be overly critical and slow moving
·         Co-ordinators might over delegate leaving themselves little work to do
·         Implementers might be slow to relinquish their plans in favour of positive changes
·         Completer Finishers could be accused of taking their perfectionism to the extremes
·         Team workers might become indecisive when unpopular decisions need to be made
·         Shapers could risk becoming aggressive and bad-humoured in their attempts to get things done
·         Specialist may have a tendency to focus narrowly on their own subject of choice

Next, MBTI, the Myers and Briggs foundation is personal inventory of psychology by C.G Jung. The theory has variety of result that related with individual of perception and judgement. There are six identification and description of personality type. Here’s the identification and example of questions:

Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world?

Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).

Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning?

Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances?

Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options?

Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

Description for each type:

Source(s):

The Myers & Briggs Foundation - MBTI® Basics. 2014. The Myers & Briggs Foundation - MBTI® Basics. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/. [Accessed 25th November 2014].