Team
practice
Our
teamwork
To achieve this collaboration, our team
first had an on line meeting by Skype. Because the our morning class group
never meet the members of evening class group, we should know more about each other
first. In the first meeting on line, we made a brief schedule for this project
in terms of timeline, content and the internal deadline of our whole team. We
decided to have a meeting on line every week, and we would like to have an
extra meeting when we faced some problems.
To ensure we can exchange and share
information immediately, we also built QQ group and WeChat group to
communicate. Totally, we conducted more than five meetings on line.
1. We
exchanged our understanding and perspectives on this project and got an
agreement at the end of this meeting. We highlighted several points in this
project and decided to regard these points as what we should focus on.
Primarily, all the members of both two groups were a bit confused about the
sense of a virtual team which would affect our collaboration. Through this
meeting, we got a direction about this collaboration
2. The
second and third time, we mainly put the project we would like to work as the
key contents of our on-line meetings. First both two groups respectively shown
the two ideas for this project, and then we discussed the feasibilities of
these ideas. Due to the requirement of this project, we must be clear how to
build a virtual community between two different industries which are not
related. We selected two ideas which we thought are appropriate at the end of
these two meetings.
3. As what
we mentioned above, we had concluded two ideas we prefer to use. The first idea
comes from our morning class group; we preferred to combine the energy industry
and catering industry. Our idea was that energy company can collect the food
waste from restaurants to extract the oil for manufacturing. While the evening
group’s idea was O2O business of restaurants. Hence, we should choose one of
these two ideas or come up with a new idea. The criteria we used to determine
our final idea mainly are creativity, innovation, and feasibility. After a long
time discussion in the fourth meeting, we rejected both the two previous ideas.
We extracted the strengths from the previous ideas and came up with a new idea,
collaboration between two O2O businesses, which meets the requirements of this
project more.
Conflicts
and obstacles
As the requirement of this project says,
the two groups cannot meet in real life. It means the only way we can
communicate is Internet. Hence, the first conflict in this collaboration is
confirming the time of on-line meeting. Usually it is an easy thing to do, but
in this situation, all of us have our own works, especially for the part-time
students. An effective way to solve this conflict is we should adjust our
personal schedule and then make a congruency. We also did not know each other before;
hence the members from morning class do not familiar to the work habits and
personalities of the member from evening class and vice versa. Long distance
communication can trigger more problems than a face to face communication
because people cannot see the expression on others’ face and hear the tone of
others speaking. It means sometimes we will misunderstand what others mean only
rest on words on screen.
After the preparatory work, we had some
conflicts in discussion. The first one occurred when we exchanged our own
understandings of this assignment. It was very difficult for us to make a
congruency in terms of the contents of the requirement. The members of evening
class group thought that this collaboration should be made between one physical
company and a virtual platform at first. While our group preferred to
understand this collaboration as one between two physical industries. This
conflict lasted for a long time from our second meeting to our fourth meeting. After
the second meeting, all of us reviewed and revised our understanding of
requirement, but we cannot immediately deliver our updated opinions to other
group so that we cannot find the common point we should focus on in next
discussion. Hence, a previous topic cannot be continued but be skipped sometimes.
Because we did not have much time to discuss, we could only accelerate our
progress to make a congruency. Therefore, we did not consider everything so
fully that the ignored problems triggered more problems afterwards.
The
problems of understanding requirement lasted to the time we talked about the
final project. First, our morning class group did not agree with evening class
group speaking of the idea about restaurant O2O business. The reason we did not
agree is Openrice.com have existed for a long time, and there is no difference
between the business evening class group suggested to do and Openrice.com.
Meanwhile, actually we can regard the industry Openrice.com belonged as that restaurant
belonged. Likewise, evening class group also did not agree our opinions. They
thought that it is not feasible to build a virtual community between energy
industry and catering industry.
It seems no group wanted to compromise. The
problem at that time was we were all willing to use our own ideas but not to
accept others opinions. To break the bottleneck, we can use some approaches of
collaboration and negotiation. Usually, when people want to get a win-win
result, they must firstly find the common interests between two parties in the
collaboration. The situation in our group was the evening class group insisted
in O2O business. Hence, we should find the reason why they prefer this kind of
business. Through communicating and discussing, we knew that evening class
group prefers to equate the virtual community to an on-line platform. It means
in fact the only thing they insisted in was an on-line platform. Having looked
back, we did not agree with evening class group because we thought their ideas
are not creative and innovative. The way for us to get a congruency is clear now;
we just need to build a business with creative on-line platform. Then we came
up with an idea that we can combine two different O2O businesses to innovate.
Team
process
To ensure we can make an effective
collaboration, we decided to follow several principals we learned in class to
facilitate our collaboration.
1。 Consider taking the team on a
retreat to allow open discussion of issues in an
informal setting - this will
build in a social dimension to collaboration
This principal is the one we kept best.
During the whole process of this collaboration, we always do our best to make a
flexible and relax atmosphere in our team. First, we had our on-line meeting in
evening because we all finished our work or class at that time. Secondly, we
did not go to the topic directly but we would like to chat first about the
things happened around us in daytime. It seems we waste time on something not
related to our project, but we can know more about each other through informal
talking. Thirdly, an achievement was not required at the end of our on-line
meetings because all of us did not want to pressure others. One thing
emphasized in the requirement is our project should be creative, while people
cannot be very creative when they are under high pressures. Hence, we kept our
team on a retreat all the time which help us get more inspiration.
2. Encourage the team to recognize
that the project is not just one person's endeavor
We also kept this commitment well because
there is no expert in our team. All the work of this assignment should be
completed by all members of this team. Actually, in our team, every opinion
suggested by individual should be discussed. Also, when we went about the
project, everyone had specific and defined role with different
responsibilities.
When we discussed, we hope all the members
can show their ideas or recommend others’ ideas. We thought an idea cannot take
everything into consideration, so others’ recommendation can help to improve
the idea.
3. Focus on solutions, not
problems, and emphasize that reaching a solution quickly is to everyone's
benefit
At first
we could not keep this commitment well, especially the time we talked about the
details of this project. We focused on the detailed things which cannot be explained
well on line so that we were all confused by these things. Then we found that
we sometimes forgot the arguments we discussed on the previous meeting but we
can still progress our project. It means we need not to focus on the problems
but on the solutions. For instance, when we hesitated to choose one of the two
ideas, the things we talked about most was the feasibility of other group’s
idea but not how to improve the feasibility, and this issue really wasted much
time. To keep the pace with the course, we must get some agreements in a
certain time. Therefore, we recognized we must immediately find the solution
for the problems occurred in our team but not discuss the characters and
features of the problems.
4。 Ensure all team members have
the opportunity to contribute
This project is an assignment of our common
course. It is obviously that the aim of this project is helping students
well-know the knowledge and skill of collaboration and the way to apply
theories into practice. Therefor it is necessary to ensure all the team members
can fully take part in this project. We will not ignore any opinion from a team
member no matter the opinion with high feasibility or not. If we want to reject
an idea, we should provide enough evidences. Even though a team member’s
opinion had been rejected, we also would like to find the highlights in his
opinion or idea
5.Encourage and/or facilitate a
climate in which participants build on others' suggestions without concern for
a particular area of expertise.One of the specialties of our project is
all the progresses were mainly depending on team members’ ideas and opinions.
It means some theories or suggestions from some experts are not suited for our
project. Although, we asked professor YU’s opinions for our project, the
opinions were mainly concerned with the requirement of this assignment but not
the content of this project.
Information
sharing
We built
a community online which we can upload documents to. After determining the
business, we divided the responsibilities that evening class group were charge
of Link REIT with ParkingtoRice.com and morning class group were charge of
restaurants with openrice.com. Both groups made an outline of their own part
and shared on the virtual community. To improve the effectiveness, all of us
did not share the detailed content on line. Meanwhile, when we found some
important information and data which even though are not related to our part,
we would share the information and data online to help another group work.
Group
work evaluation
We come from two different classes, even
though we did not each other before and we never meet the members of another
group, we made a great work in limited resources. All team members contribute
much in this project to make this project to be creative and feasible. We had
some conflict for this project, but we kept good relationship well all the time
and only focused on how to solve the conflicts. We gave full respect to others
and others’ opinions because all the ideas and opinions from team members
should be given considerable deserved attention.
The business of our project happens in Hong
Kong, so we asked advice for the local student in our team. We should keep high
feasibility of our project and help all the companies involved in our project
add values for their own business. In addition, we did our best to complete our
virtual community to ensure that this virtual community is not doing futile
work for the two sides in this collaboration.
Finally, I think our project fully fulfill
the criteria of the requirements with high creativity and diversity.
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