How to Work Effectively in a Team
I have grown quite used to doing work on my own. I’ve always liked the idea of doing solo work, I have full creative control, I have all my own files, and no one is telling me to “try it this way instead.” However, this isn’t how creative and innovative work is made, and about a year ago I was beginning to realize this.
It was the beginning of the new semester for a practicum class, where I knew we would be assigned “official” work for a variety of clients. I was nervous and excited, I knew there would be groups for this client work, in an attempt to emulate an internship, entry-level job situation. I ended up getting assigned to a group of about 5 people, not bad, I remember thinking. Each of us brought a different personality type, set of skills, and proficiency to the table. We were assigned out first project and met with our clients. It was creating some pretty simple signage for Utah Valley University’s ROTC club. They were looking to get some pretty basic digital posters created so they could have the files, fill out the content as needed and be able to recycle those posters for a number of different events around campus. It seemed easy enough. I figured each teammate would think of some ideas, come back in a week and boom we’d have some camo’d out posters to send out to the client. But, in reality that vision was a little too perfect.
In about our second team meeting we’d assigned the task of each creating our own digital signage designs. By week three though we had a teammate drop the class, which was okay we still had 4 people, and the work was still manageable. By week five though we finally came to terms with the fact that we’d lost another teammate on top of the last. So we still had 3 people…I began to get a little nervous. We sent some template designs over to our client, again with the idea that we were still “doing our own things”. But at week seven or so we had to reassess. It turns out that three of us were all going in different directions, a couple of us had sent out designs to the client and one still hadn’t, oh and we all preferred/sent out different file types. At about the seven or eight week mark our 3rd teammate mostly stopped coming to the meetings. There was 2 of us left and we knew we had to refine our system quickly and efficiently. We needed to streamline our design process and start really working together, like we should've from the get go.
Where should we start? How do we even start? Trying to combine now 6–7 weeks of individual brainstorming, sketching, and work. With some help from our professor, we were able to come up with a plan. This were the steps of that plan:
Step 1: Use a whiteboard!
Even if they are just some simple sketches or diagrams, they are worth it. Not only were we able to bounce some ideas off of each other but we were able to get to know each other a lot better by just having a common goal.
Step 2: Create and set a style guide and requirements.
We found that we were all over the place in terms of the files we were preparing to send out. File types of images we were using were inconsistent, causing all of the pictures we used to look different from each other. We decided we could come up with some basic guidelines to follow and we would set aside a 2–3 images we would only use for these posters, and these images were sent to us by the UVU ROTC club leaders with their permission to use them. The guidelines can be as easy as this: we wanted a color palette, well we went with UVU’s official colors (green, black, white); we were again all over the board with fonts, so we went back to what was already working, UVU’s standard font for all digital media. Once we created this standard for ourselves, we actually had more freedom.
Step 3: Communicate and revise.
My teammate and I were really able to flourish creatively when we began communicating with each other via email or text every day or every other day, just to keep each other updated with where the other was with their portion of the work. It made us hold not just the other but ourselves accountable for being timely with out final product. For myself, I can say that working with other people involved, I want to push myself in different ways and open up my mind to other design possibilities and strategies.
The whole process of working with a team (or a partner) motivated me to try and produce better work. Overall we were able to walk away from that class with some fun and unique work, and once we gained some comfortability with one another we were eager for the other to critique it. With constructive thoughts on our work we were able to better our designs.
Christian Mercado is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction Design. This article relates to the “Digital Signage-Final Projects” project in the DGM 221R course and is representative of the skills learned.
