Team Productivity
Working in a team is not easy, especially when each team member comes from a very different background. During the last quarter, we had difficulties in communication, work allocation, and time management. We are glad to have an open team environment and had some of the issues solved, but we still have something that needs to work on in this quarter.
To begin with, here’re 3 aspects that we successfully mastered in the last quarter to optimize team productivity.
Open Communications
Our team spends a lot of time having meetings and working together to make sure everyone is on the same page. At the beginning of the quarter when we have the first internal meeting, all of us agreed on having an open environment that every team member should be comfortable with sharing any concerns or bringing in any different voices.
Therefore, when peer-reviewing each other’s work, we are not afraid of pointing out what can be improved. Also, when we don’t understand something, we are comfortable asking anyone else in the team to clarify.
We carry this spirit not only in internal meetings but also in meetings with MIP and the professor.
Because of the nature of our MIP Reviewbox being a tech start-up, the biggest concern of our practicum team is that we are worried about not coming out with any meaningful output. We brought out this concern with MIP and professor frankly. After discussions, we came to the consensus that we have the flexibility of coming up with a new subproject if we think that might lead to meaningful results. Therefore, we are more comfortable with working on the project without being worried too much. An interesting fact about our team is that “Discovering nothing is a discovery” is our slogan.
Learning From Each Other
I learned a lot from my teammates during collaboration. Over the last quarter, we’ve been assigned many tasks, including reports, codes, and deliverables to MIP. Since our teammates come from different cultural and academic backgrounds, each of us is good at different things.
Our project manager is extremely good at communicating with MIP and professor and keep the meetings moving, our tech lead is good at coding and our “visualization expert” is good at making good-looking PowerPoint and reports. During the collaboration with my team, I learned what to say in professional meetings, I practiced writing clean code, and I learned how to beautify reports and PowerPoint.
When writing the summary report, the essay was divided into 7 parts that each of us was responsible for a certain part. After finish the first draft, we prove to read others’ work and give feedback to help each other improve writing skills.
Learning from each other can significantly improve team efficiency and every team member can take advantage of this process.
Useful tools
We noticed the power of technology in improving team productivity.
Trello: We use Trello to assign work and deadline to each individual, so everyone knows what to do through the dashboard.
Google Doc: When writing the summary report, we work on individual parts on Google Doc. With the help of shared files, we are able to avoid writing similar things since we can see others’ work. We can also leave comments to others when there exists confusion or there’s a better way of writing so.
Github: In this quarter, since we need to spend a lot of time coding, we plan to use GitHub to help collaborate that we can see each other’s work process and work based on others’ output. We believe that Github can save out time in communicating and improve efficiency.
After talking about the problems we encountered in terms of team productivity, let me point out 2 things that we still need to work on in order to improve future team productivity.
Limited Meeting Times
One thing our team suffers a lot is that we have too many meetings, including meetings with MIP, meetings with business and tech mentors, meetings with the professor, and internal meetings with teammates. We spend way too much time attending meetings rather than working on actual tasks. According to an article on Harvard Business Review, most employees believe meetings are useless and meeting time should be limited. We couldn’t agree more. We scheduled one day per week to meet up at school and work together on the practicum project, but the result was not satisfying. We definitely spent too much time discussing the project instead of actually working on coding and analyzing. Time management is essential to optimizing team productivity, especially when it comes to each team member’s work process. We believe that our meeting time should be limited. After assigning tasks to individuals, we should work on our tasks and then set up the next meeting when everyone has the output. In that way, meetings could be more efficient and meaningful.
Setting Attainable Goals
Another thing our team didn’t do well over the last quarter is that we shifted the subproject too frequently. Unlike some other practicum teams whose tasks were assigned by their MIP, our team has great flexibility in deciding what tasks to work on. However, we struggled in deciding on which subproject to do and at the same time, we didn’t set tangible deadlines efficiently, so we were not clear about when to finish each subproject. According to Caroline Baron, correctly measuring the team’s efficiency and capability and setting the right goal is the key to team productivity. After meeting with MIP, considering the workload at school and our team’s capability, we decided not to start anything new in this quarter, so the main focus would be to finish up the two projects we started last quarter. At the beginning of this quarter, we established a roadmap that lists everything we plan to finish by the end of this quarter with the deadlines of each subproject. In this way, each of us knows what and when to finish.
References:
Perlow. Leslie.A. “Stop the Meeting Madness,” Harvard Business Review, Aug. 2017， https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness
Baron. Caroline. “How to boost your team’s productivity with 6 simple steps,” Julie Desk, 30 Nov. 2017, https://www.juliedesk.com/blog/increase-team-productivity/
