Week 3

There are a lot of variations on what constitutes an "effective" team or a successful team. Shelves upon shelves of self-help and project management "guides" are used and people follow them like the bible. Ultimately, I don't believe that there is any one method that will create the perfect team although I believe that there are certain parts of any number of methods that could create an extremely effective team. In the prescribed online reading, there were multiple quizzes regarding "what kind of teamwork" that we've done; "Are you an effective team member?", things like that. These only help if you're really honest with yourself. "I start the group working", well what if someone gets in there first? (For the record, I was "in there" first, jussayin'). Some of the questions were a simple matter of whether or not you were an open-minded person, something that could be solved in a matter of a few questions.

Going back to teamwork, I just finished reading a book on a certain project management practice. Having its roots from Agile methodology, Scrum, an iterative methodology, is a practice used mostly in software development and consists of a series of iterations called "sprints" (which last one to four weeks). The name itself comes from rugby and the idea that the team moves forward as one unit, aiming for a shared, common goal. In the "Working In Teams" reading, there was a lot of talk about roles and designated positions. In Scrum, however, there are no real "roles" or responsibilities. If an issue comes up, the team relies on the overall communication abilities of the team and the bond within the team to resolve the issue. Think: self-cleaning dishwasher. Iterative, does the given work and cleans up after itself. A perfect student. Speaking of which, Scrum has been applied to schools in Europe, resulting in stellar grades according to one science teacher in Germany.

My point is this: for a team to work effectively, there needs to be an effective communication flow, mutual respect and a certain level of competency (something that I haven't mentioned yet). If there's an issue, talk about it. Don't let it sit and simmer. Getting out of your comfort zone and moving is sure as sh** better than staying still. The best part: my team works great. There's a great level of communication (something that took a little while but we got there), respect, and we're still working on the competency part but with the former two, I think we have a pretty solid foundation to work with.