Our first steps to build an effective team
The first workshop was a hands-on introduction to team building with fun activities. It provided reminders of what good teamwork is and encouraged us to put effort into team formation, which establishes a strong base for our project. The questions that we needed to answer in this blogpost worked as a guide during our team’s first remote meeting. We didn’t necessarily learn anything new during the first workshop, but it was a great reminder of what effective teamwork could and should be. Additionally, we believe that our team will work effectively because we’ve put effort into establishing the main principles for our teamwork.
The final paper prototyping task was especially fun and taught us that different team members contribute to a project with different kinds of assets and insights, because we all noticed different features from the original toy. It’s good to acknowledge that this is important in the actual project too. Below is the picture of our paper prototype, which was quite different from the original one but fun to make.
Introduce Team Zooming
Our team is called team Zooming. At our first online team meeting, we got to know each other and discussed about our school backgrounds and interests. Our team consists of three people: Lichia Cheng (James), Veera Eiste and Tatja Syrjämäki. We all have different study backgrounds, which certainly brings great diversity into our team. James is a current master’s student in HTI at the Tampere University with previous experience in user experience design, UI design and customer service.
Veera Eiste is a first-year master’s degree student at HTI in the Tampere University City Center campus. Veera has a bachelor’s degree in communication that emphasizes dynamics of interaction. During her master’s degree studies she has gained experience in UX design, usability testing and interaction design.
Tatja Syrjämäki is an adult learner who has a bachelor’s degree in tourism management from the Haaga-Helia university of applied sciences. Tatja is currently working on a website renewal project. Through her work and previous studies, Tatja has become familiar with customer experience, usability testing and UX design.
What are our team goals?
Together with the team, we discussed our goals for the teamwork and what we want to learn from this course. We all agreed that our main goal is to learn and get used to following human-centered design methods. Also, we all have personal goals of building a portfolio, so we hope that we can use this project in our portfolios. Alongside the learning experience, we want to document our progress in order to have an end result of the project with competent level. Our goal is to write a blog that is insightful and can be used for industry insights.
We talked about what kind of team we want to form. During the course, we hope to learn to work in a team remotely and complete a project in a successful manner. Our team works remotely and with people from a variety of disciplines, which are common in the industry. Our team decided that our communication is going to focus on three platforms. Based on our past experiences we are going to use Slack for messaging, Zoom for remote meetings and Trello to communicate the tasks and follow the progress. For the blog posts we use Medium.
To achieve our goals, we will have project owners which are responsible to keep track of the project. Our description of the project is parts or segments of the process (blog, prototyping, video). The project owner has the final say in decision making for minor to intermediate decisions. For larger decisions, the project owner has to communicate with the team first. If there are some conflicts in terms of decision making with the project owner, team members should either bring the discussion to the weekly meeting or the stand up meeting. All the team members contribute to all the parts of the project, but we’ll have different tasks that we’re responsible for throughout the process.
The secrets of our great teamwork
Our intention is to have open communication, where feedback is encouraged on weekly basis via messaging and on weekly stand-up meetings. To ensure good and effective communication, we agreed to raise any potential questions and problems whenever it’s necessary. To make sure our team continues to develop, we will have pre-determined milestones to strive towards, and which we will look back to and review in terms of what was good and what could be improved. During the process we will constantly evaluate the effectiveness of the team and the tools we use. We will have weekly check-ups and stand-up meetings every 2 days via Slack. During our Zoom meetings, we’ll discuss on bigger decisions in more detail. To follow up our project goals, we will use Trello to track progress and assign work.
As each of us have our strengths and weaknesses, each member of the team should work on what they are good at and help others in what they are weak in, improving the overall productivity. We will constantly evaluate our process and report individual contribution based on the roles and the projects assigned in Trello. At the end of the first meeting, we discussed about the topics that we would like to have for our group assignments. We considered different options, thinking about opportunities, prototype creation, potential customers and markets. We made an ordered list about the topics we wish to take and now we wait excitedly which topic we will be assigned to.
