Before we began working on our project, we first created a team charter to help create a group purpose and vision. In our charter we detailed goals, team expectations, schedules, and listed strengths and weaknesses of each member. This process made it so that we felt personally connected to the project and helped us attach meaning to it. We were also able to become more connected as a group, learning more about different members and their values.
A few weeks into working on our project, we were given a survey in which we were to gauge our group processes and evaluate team strengths and weaknesses. We were then given data based on our group’s answers and told to discuss. This allowed our group to look inwards and re-evaluate how to approach the project in the remaining weeks, something that we had not done until that point. This gave us the opportunity to have an open-conversation in which we felt comfortable voicing concerns; we found that members of the group needed to participate more and that there needed to be more urgency in completing the project. The Check-In facilitated a discussion that allowed us to maximize the potential of our group and smoothen any roadblocks.
In order to build a high-performing team and avoid anything dysfunctional, such as absence of trust and fear of conflict, we have set up an advanced agenda to make sure all our work and meetings will go as we expected. In addition, we also practiced the rule of honor expertise which allowed every person in the team to work according to their expertise. By doing this, we were able to discuss strategies to get the work done more efficiently and not bogged down with ego issues that a hard-working member of the team can do anything, even if it is not their expertises.
In order to make our team efficient and finish our project on time, we divided our project into five different parts: an analytics dictionary, types of analytics Jobs, application materials, networking, and interviews. The interview part requires a lot of work and resources, in this case, we decided to assign two members to this part. It turned out that our division of labor was successful and we finished our project one week before the deadline.
Our group implemented Agile Practices in the following aspects:
Interviewing target users to meet the highest priority of satisfying customers
Having team discussion weekly to update project status
Welcome changing requirements: Github and R Studio enable us to adjust the structure of our project easily
We adopt face-to-face communication for most of the project discussions
We set the project vision and scope with a planning meeting to determine what is our end goal of the project and how we will achieve it
We created a release plan for our project
We kept our team on track with daily stand-ups