Henry Individual Reflection

This three months long lasting project is the one that left me the deepest impression, the one that gave me the chance to build friendship with the friends I treasure and also the one taught me how to really work and cooperate with teammates and people outside the team, even in a virtual way. This project lasted for 3months or so, and it would never end if I recall the whole process one point by one point. Hereby, I’d like to elaborate the project from two major dimension of view, the first is inside our own team, the other is between us morning team and the evening team.

Virtual teams Identification

The first thing that we must be clear of is that we should first know what we are actually doing. Frankly speaking, at the beginning days, we all three team members of our team are confused of what a virtual team actually is on earth, and we just started to do the team project without understanding what we are doing and until divergence came which made us must be clear of what a virtual team really is.

Everything is going ok of the communication with the evening class, and on our second skype online meeting of the two groups, the leader of the evening class Kit raised up a question for he started to doubt we were not clear on the virtual team thing and asked on skype ‘Do you guys know what a real virtual team is?’ After 5 minutes of discussion, we came into a common point of understanding what a virtual teamwork meant. As we two teams came out with, virtual teams first they must have the same direction and same goal to reach which is based on the cooperation of the team members and between two teams. So ‘Team’ is the first important word. Another significant concept is the word ‘Virtual’, which means on one side we are doing a project by realizing it in a virtual way that is to build the parkingtorice.com link to provide service, and on the other side virtual also means the way we are doing the project is a virtual way which must not be limited by time, distance and space, and all the information could be shared to each of the member instantly rather than emails which is not a timely way. When this very significant point is known to each of us, then we are clear of what we are doing and what we should do, the following work would be much more smooth to us. So this is the process of us how we identify a virtual teamwork project, which is the first big obstacle we jumped over.

Team Practice and Process

The team practice procedure is thing that has various tastes that it not only brings exciting and interesting moments into our life but also brings frustration and obstacles. Luckily, we two teams finally went through all the way successfully and worked things out.

(1) Communication：

Members of our morning class team are Qiqi, Titi and I, and we three are from the same stable class which makes us know each other very well and have more common time to see each other and communicate. Generally speaking, the chance that three of us meet each other together face to face is about two days a time. But as for the energy we spared on the virtual project, we spend most of them by using Wechat group talking. The most important reason is that most of the time we must keep the same moving speeding with the evening team. And once they had new changes, our team must do adjustment to keep the pace, and most of the time those things happened all of a sudden when three of us are not together. For the frequency inside our team, we contact each other almost every day to exchange information from macro view plan to micro execution of the project. Like in the early first month, most of the contents we discussed is about what kind of project we should choose to do. And about one month later, when we had decided to do the parkingtorice.com, we mostly talked about is what specific item we should think about related to the parkingtorice.com plan, like what kinds of material and data we should select to make our plan more persuasive and executable. In general, the communication inside our team is very effective and abundant, and there’s no big obstacle emerged during the whole internal communication. But things are a little bit different in the external communication with the evening team.

In accordance with the major technology tool we are using, the communicating process with the evening team could be classified into four stages:

The first stage is when we use email as the major tool to communicate with each other. At the first two weeks, email is the only channel to get into contact with the other teams, and our team was honored to receive the evening class email from Kit at the first place. And after I replied and got all the two team members’ skype account and created a group chat on skype. Before that, we two teams had 5 times of emailing on the cityu email system, and the main content is about building a new virtual platform to exchange information.

The second stage is in the skype phase. We two team spent three weeks on the skpye group chat and organized three joint online discussions to decide what would be the final project we should be doing. During the process, they carried out the parkingtorice.com plan and out group carried out the dirty oil cycling plan. After two weeks of discussion and considering, we found that the evening group could provide more powerful evidence to make their plan to be realistic, and one of them is Hong Kong local who got lots of first-hand information to support the plan.

The third stage is the wechat stage. The reason we choose to use another virtual tool to communicate is that skype couldn’t satisfy our instant needs any more since we had already made the last decision on the project choosing. So again I created a wechat group so as to have instant information anywhere and anytime. There’s a pity that Kerry of the evening class is not willing to use the wechat software to stay in touch with other members, and so far until now, the wechat group only contains five members except Kerry. So I guess maybe Kerry should be more open, supportive and active to use the wechat so that we could really build a win-win cooperation relationship.

The last stage is the wechat and QQ stage. With the project progress going, there’s a lot more files and materials we need to share. And the above three channel couldn’t satisfy our needs of sharing and also being instant. There are always more solutions than obstacles. So then I created a QQ group which has almost all the functions that a virtual group need. And this time, every member was involved. To this stage, all the final virtual channels had been built up which took us one and half months. Since then, the instant communication, information sharing and group chatting was no longer a problem.

During this long virtual channels forming period, every member was most cooperative and supportive, even though some small issues that didn’t fit the cooperative atmosphere, but they didn’t block our way of moving forward.

(2)Obstacles:

Despite the truth that the cooperation inside our team and the cooperation between the two teams are generally good, but obstacles are inevitable.

The first obstacle is from inside the team, the working style of we three members are a little bit different. I ‘m the person with a style that use moderate time on the tasks and work so that the work would not influence other plans, and I think if we spend too much time on some work, the efficiency may not be high. And one member of our team, Qiqi, who may be very responsible and wanted to do the task on the basis that we are quite well prepared and want to spend moderate long time on fulfilling the task. As for Titi, who is mostly close to my working style. This difference increase the intensity of the team work in some way, but two sides of us all moved back for a step and we could finally made thing go on.

The second obstacle is at the beginning of the project when we are communicating on emails, confusion came that to one mail, almost all the members replied, which is kind of mess. So, regardless of being active, each of the team just assign one person to have direct email communicating on the internet. Then Kit was on behalf of their team and I was representing our team. And the others mainly chat on QQ and wechat.

Another obstacle is that one member of the evening class is a little bit of stubborn when discussing what name to use for the virtual platform. The member of the evening team gave some explanation and instructions to persuade us to use the long and complicated name. But all the members of our team thought that was not appropriate for a website name. And it was very hard for us to take about 15minutes to persuade the evening class to accept our idea. I guess this is another big obstacle I found in the virtual project processing.

(3)Two sides of the technology:

In this virtual project, most of the time, we two teams were using those virtual software to communicate and share information, and after about three month, we finally did what we originally intended to do which is due to the magic power of modern internet technology.

The internet technology played two important roles in the project. The first function it has is that it could provide a no limit communicating space for people who are access to it no matter where you are and when it is. This, on a large scale, helped a lot in instant communicating and information flow. The second function the technology channel brought to us was that it gave us endless and infinite amount of material that we may took into use. For the truth is that almost all the information and pictures we used in presentation and reports were found through all kinds of virtual channels.

Every coin has its two sides. Even though the internet technology helped a lot, but it in some way also dragged down the speed of the project. For example, if we could meet each other face to face and had a discussion around a table or something, then the final forming of the joint project target would took only for several days rather than over a month. So in this case, what I concluded was that never tried to use one way to realize the project, the best choice is mostly a combination one.

Conclusion

In this three month long virtual project, I have a totally different understanding of how to really use the virtual channel to do some practical work rather than just playing online games and some casual chatting. And the cooperation experience in the project would enormously benefit me in the long term of life. If I could have a job done successfully in a virtual way and meanwhile develop the cooperative relationship with the workmates, then the physical way would be a smaller case to me.

And lastly I’d like to thank our teammates Qiqi and Titi, because I did lean a lot from each of them. Not only Qiqi’s responsibility in the tasks and work, but also Titi’s creative ways of thinking and excellent organizing ability. And also the evening class teammates all gave a great lesson in the cooperation time with them. Maybe the benefit of this virtual project will not appear now, but the seeds are sowed in my mind, and some day not long in the future, all those experiences of this three months would help me out subconsciously when I’m confused or stuck in hard issues.

Hereby, I’d like to use one sentence to end my self reflection. Once, I wondered why Frank didn’t give a lot of oral instruction in classes, and now I found the answer: Experiencing is the best way to learn!