Organizing the Team
How do you keep record of all the task?
As with any project, managing a team of 5 is not a simple task. This has multiple sections to it, so get ready!
Understanding your team
Have you learned #emergentproperties already? Then you should know that the best quality product is possible only through effective teamwork! So the first step is to set up the base for productive and joyful collaboration.
Why is it important? You will work in the team for half a year. It is in your best interest to understand yourself and your teammates to enjoy what you are doing! What each of you is good at and can be responsible for, and what is better to delegate to your teammates? How not to offend your teammates? How to effectively communicate with your teammates? All these questions you need to keep in mind throughout your working process, and here are some tips on how to find the answers.
1. Get to know each other beyond the working context
This is the best way to set up positive team dynamics! Find an activity that you can do all together: it can be a party, cooking and having dinner together, going out to explore the city as a group, or anything else that you can do all together. Be creative! Learn each other through spending time together. This is also something that is nice to do while working on a project - you all are Minervans after all!
2. Learn yourself
Each of you is a part of the team, so it is important that you understand yourself. You’ve already been introduced #selfawareness during the Foundation Week - this is your chance to apply this HC in practice! Learn your strengths and weaknesses; what tasks do you enjoy doing and are doing well, and what do not bring you that much pleasure. If you are not sure how to learn about yourself effectively, then the office hours of your Complex Systems professor would be a very useful resource for you!
3. Understand the #differences
Probably, by this moment you haven’t been introduced this HC yet. However, Minervans always find the ways to tackle the system! Go ahead and look at #differences in the Outcome Index - it will help you a lot in understanding how to be effective as a team at all stages of your teamwork. You are lucky - there are some tools that were developed specifically for this purpose!
True Color Personality Test
When we passed this test, we were amazed how accurately it reflects each of us! Use this tool to learn more about yourself and your teammates - it can guide you to distribute the labor effectively.
Big Five Personality Test
Another test, which you will need to take in your Complex Systems class next semester. Why not to take it now to see how much you’ve changed this time? It is another approach to look at your team!
GlobeSmart Profile
Did you know that you can compare your profiles? No? Then don’t waste anymore time - it is a lot of fun to learn how you are similar or different to your teammates!
When our team just started working on a hackathon, we knew only about GlobeSmart, which we haven’t really used while working on a hackathon. What a mistake! We had a lot of moments when we couldn’t organize our work effectively, miscommunicated, and even had a conflict in our team. It led to wasting a lot of time, redoing parts of the job, and partly burning out. Don’t repeat our mistakes! [1]
Distributing the responsibilities
Making a hackathon is a difficult process, and you will be challenged in many ways. When constructing the core team for your hackathon, keep in mind these skills listed, and try have as many if not all of them in your team!
Soft Skills:
Time-keeping
Leadership
Negotiation
Logistics
Hard Skills:
Website design
General graphic design (for marketing)
Programming knowledge (for the tracks)
Knowledge of emailing tools
Creating a team agreement
Having a team agreement is very important to have effective team interactions in the future. Distributing the responsibilities and outlining some rules is very helpful to maintain a collaborative team spirit as it provides everyone with the accountability framework in case some problems arise. At least some level of formality is very helpful because it facilitates conflict management in the team and, most important, helps to avoid personal conflicts as conflicting parties understand that they must act by rules. These regulations can be as simple or funny as you want, in our team, the person who missed the meeting or missed the deadline needed to cook a dinner for the whole group. Sharing a meal together is a very effective tool to enhance interpersonal relationships in any team, thus when someone cooked for the whole group, it did not have adverse effects on team spirit as other punishments could have.
Organizing communication and documentation
During our time in trying to make this a reality, we held meetings every week. We also had to communicate with each other, and with our Civic Partner, Capri.
Our main tool of organization was a meeting notes Google Doc that we kept updated every week.
The important parts of meetings were:
Always have an Agenda ready to know what to discuss
Keep note of the decisions you make
Have a way to separate 'action items'
Some weeks we had a lot of these, so we put them in another section, while in other weeks we simply marked them with "ACTION:"
For our communications, we had three important channels:
1st channel, Telegram: For most of our internal informal communications, we used the popular messaging app that was already widely used in our community. This provided quick and overhead free communications. Although not as powerful as Slack, through uses of stickers and memes, this channel provided a good team building way of communication.
2nd channel, Slack: For fast communication with our Civic Partner, Capri, and with any other Minerva personnel, we used Slack. Our school already has a infrastructure with everyone in the school having a slack account and notifications, so this was the best channel for quick access to the faculty. Although there were multiple tries to move all communications within the student body to Slack, due to being more clunky than Telegram, lack of long term free history access, and generally having a less 'fun' factor, this channel was limited to more formal communications.
3rd channel, Emails: Even in this day and age, emails provide a good way for long, important communications. Also we needed to talk with people outside of Minerva, and for that emails were the go to method.
For general organization, we also had a timeline in addition to the meetings document, which is explained in the next section.
Developing the timeline
After all the things are decided in a meeting, there comes the part of translating the things discussed into actionable items with responsible people and set deadlines. There are a lot of tasks related to creating a hackathon, so keeping a timeline is crucial to not lose track of anything, and getting things done by a timely manner.
For our timeline, we used the tool Notion. Many of our members already had experience using it for class notes and it had all the features we needed. Although we did a #gapanalysis and looked into other tools like Asana, or a simple Google Sheet, Notion was the winner with it's free student plan and minimal barrier to entry with its very simple to learn interface.
The most important factors we figured for a good use of a timeline was:
Whenever you are adding a task, also add a deadline and a person responsible
During the middle of the second semester, we had a crisis were we had a lot of tasks that no one really took onto themselves to do it without any clear deadlines. The earlier you decide these the better!
Make the tasks small enough chunks to be feasibly done by one member over a week.
If a task was too big, if often was not done by the deadline, making it problematic for the later tasks.
You can always have one big over compassing task, and add extra smaller tasks that lead up to it. Like 'create the website' being split into 'get a domain,' 'create the visuals,' and 'integrate the visuals.'
Update the timeline regularly.
There were huge chunks of time where we were just doing tasks based on what we thought should we done without adding anything to the timeline. This caused problems as time passed and people forgot what was done and what was still needed to be done.
Check the timeline regularly.
Our team had a habit of not doing this, resulting in the common message in our group chat "when is x due?" followed by a general confusion before someone actually checked the timeline.
So all in all, there will always be confusions as to who is doing what and what actually needs to be done. However using these techniques and tools, you can reduce the confusion to more feasible levels!
HC Footnotes:
[1] #selfawareness: Our lack of awareness about the issues in team dynamics and their reasons resulted in decreasing the quality of our communication and poor performance on assigned tasks. Our strategy to increase our awareness about internal problems was through communication: we allocated time in our team meetings, as well as during meetings with our Civic Partner Capri, to understand what is going wrong. After hypothesizing that our problems have been caused by insufficient interpersonal engagement, we decided to spend more time as a team by sharing the dinners and discussing our personality tests results. As an outcome, despite not achieving the perfect team dynamics, we were able to significantly increase our performance and communication.
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