Small Team and Group Experience Paper

Small Team and Group Experience Paper

Daniel Martin

Last year, one of the courses I was taking at the University of Miami was Finance and Investment Securities. As our final exam grade for this class, we were split up into groups of 5 and told to collectively construct a well-organized and detailed assessment of a fast food chain. This specific type of evaluation we had to do is called a S.W.O.T analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Analyzing an establishment based on this framework can successfully help to improve a company’s business plan and marketing strategies. This project also involved us designing a PowerPoint as well as a group written paper and group oral presentation. Our professor gave us approximately two and half weeks to complete this assignment.

Our primary goal was to establish our group’s project leader. It was interesting to see that some of the other groups didn’t find that aspect necessary for them, so they decided to take different routes. My group unanimously agreed that we would benefit from having a project leader because we all concurred that a leader would help provide clear goals and objectives in order to maintain a focused vision throughout. A classmate of mine named Marissa decided to step up to the plate because she felt she had the extra time in her schedule for this task. Since we had all been in this class together for the past 4 months, Marissa felt she could effectively and equally delegate responsibilities based on her previously observing our strengths and weaknesses. In class we were given a few minutes to pick the establishment we wanted to further research so we all threw out some popular brands and fortunately we were all able to easily pick Wendy’s- being that we even had one on campus and across the street. Since there are 4 aspects of a SWOT analysis, I was given the responsibility of researching the company’sthreats and every other member had his or her own focus. This type of individual accountability showed to be very efficacious for us because everyone was able to pull their weight and we didn’t have to encounter the problems of “free-riders” – which can be a common problem in group work. Early on, this allocation of responsibilities also eliminated the problem of possibly misunderstanding our objectives and leaving something critical out.

With the advent of new forms of technology all readily available atour fingertips, communicating and problem solving with each other came easily. Not only does the institution have a remarkable array of reserves, but using the speed of Internet and school databases certainly benefited us more because of our short time constraint. When we would begin to bump heads on certain factual discrepancies such as the company’s upcoming marketing techniques, it was easy to immediately turn to the Internet to find correct information- instead of letting temperaments get the best of ourselves and possibly hinder our progress.

When it was time to write the paper, we encountered some trouble because we knew collectively sitting at a computer together could take too much time, but on the other hand if we wrote our own paragraphs separately, the flow of the paper could be easily disrupted. I remembered that for a previous assignment I successfully used Google Docs so I mentioned to my group that this application would work very well with our project. Google Docs promotes collaborative teamwork because everyone can work simultaneously on the same document and access it from anywhere with Internet connection. We were assigned different color fonts and after we each exhausted all of our ideas on one document, our project leader was able to take these ideas and put them into a single narrative for the group

Out of school group-work also can become very difficult when every team member is balancing their personal life and schedules begin to conflict. We were not permitted to use class time for this group project, so to find a convenient time and locationthat worked well with everyone’s conflicting schedules, proved to be a difficult task at times. Some students held a part time job, played on a travelling University sports team or commuted to and from campus. Luckily, our continual group text message chat in all of our iPhones helped us establish convenient times and places after negotiation and compromise on all of our behalf’s.

The most difficult problem we encountered was when it came time to create an oral presentation for the class because of some personality clashes. Our interpersonal skills were extremely tested when we had to do mock practice presentations for each other and then receive feedback. Marissa encouraged everyone’s contribution in a positive atmosphere but occasionally some of the criticism felt like personal attacks on the individual’s presentation skills. This is when Marissa would step in and make sure we understood not to criticize each other, but instead constructively and honestly criticized the ideas themselves. Our leader did a really great job of establishing a shared sense of accomplishment and pride in all of our combined effort

Overall, I am actually amazed at how well this collective project went because I have previously only heard about the negative connotations associated with group work. I found our biggest advantage to be the goals, roles and ground rules we established early on. From the beginning, we immediately promised to each other that we would keep all communication lines consistently open and always respond to our group texts within a few hours. We also guaranteed each other that we would never fail to meet deadlines because that would only negatively affects every other team member. I found our group to be most effective when everyone had the chance to explain their ideas and we were able to collectively pick the strongest ones. None of us needed to be the “star of the show” because we were all aiming for a high final exam grade and we all understood that this project would not come together without the cooperation and contribution of every member.