In an early post about teamwork I anguished a bit about how hard it was going to be. I've been trying to come to grips with the difficulties I anticipate in working on a big database/information retrieval/user interface project. (For more info about the project, look at the LIS 540 course webpage and scroll down to "Team project.")
Part of the problem is that the group is just so darn big. There are six of us, which poses several difficulties. First of all, it's almost impossible to find a time when we can all meet for an hour or so. Secondly, we've got six different opinions, and I think it may be really hard to agree on things. Luckily we've got at least two people who have experience with project management, and we've appointed one of them as our manager. She will work on keeping us on track, during meetings and outside of them too. She brought up the idea of a neutral moderator to help discussions. We decided we didn't need one yet, but we might get someone else to moderate later, if we need it.
The other problem is me. I'm generally a work-alone sort of person. I've gotten used to groups of 2-3 people, but I've never worked in such a huge committee. I'm used to having control over every part of a project, and that's simply going to be impossible in this case. We've had some discussion about which bits of the project each person is most interested in, and I couldn't really decide. I'm good at the database stuff, and I think I would be most upset if that weren't done the way I thought it should be, but I think I would learn most by working on the user interface and such. On Monday we're going to discuss tasks and roles, and at some point I have to decide what I want to do. I guess I want to be the database geek, because I think that's the part of this project to which I could contribute the most. I can learn the user interface stuff in class and put it into practice on my own.
What we're supposed to turn in for this project is a specification, not a working system. I'm not clear on whether we're supposed to have some sort of a prototype or not, but if we do, it doesn't have to do very much at all. I think it would be really snazzy to code an actual working system, and I'm sure I could do it (after all, the hard part is design, not coding, although people who don't program don't realize that, not that I'm a programmer either). I got an iffy response when I proposed that to my group, and they said "it depends" and "well okay if we don't need you to work on something else" and "it won't make any difference to our grade, because he's grading us on the spec," and unfortunately I think they're right on the last point, much as I would like to show off my |_337 5|<||_|_5.
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