We’ve come halfway through our capstone journey as a team and it has crossed my mind that I’m lucky to have come this far as a group of 3 strangers working together on one project without having any crash and burn episodes.
Thinking about it, I think what made us a good team was that everyone had professional towards the project. In the past there have been some group project nightmares I’ve went through where one thing led to the other and 5 person workload has been put on 3 people. One person was too sensitive about other team members’ thoughts of ideas and project, and eventually left the group, and another one has been barely contributing anything. I think it was a miserable experience for everyone, well maybe except for the person without doing much. In this team, everyone has been doing their share of work and actually doing quality work. The project is big that it cannot be done by one person, and everyone is aware of the timelines and own expertise, so the project has been split reasonably and everyone in the team has been contributing honest work.
It also somewhat ties into being on time and prepared. Being professional also means being responsible for own actions. This includes delivering on time and actually bringing things to the table for meetings. We held weekly meetings and no one has ever been late or missing. Everyone came prepared with the material that they had promised to deliver from the week before or ideas that needed to be implemented the following week. Thus we were never behind on timeline until now.
Being a good team member also means being respectful and considerate. There has been multiple times where we came across decision making, whether it is the tech stack, design, or timeline. Obviously we are all different people with different thoughts, and sometimes some ideas are disagreeable. Most of the time, we were able to either go with the majority vote or just respect someone else’s idea and compromise as long as it did not affect the integrity and quality. Since there was no one person yelling I want to do it my way, it was easy to cooperate and make decision logically.
One thing I like about our team was that we all had diverse background and expertise. One person prefers backend, the other prefers frontend and design, and I like like to do both. In that sense, it was easy to split the work. Also, it was great that since we have overlapping knowledge, when one person has difficulties another member can come into rescue and solve the problem.
The most important thing though, is the willingness to communicate and tackle problems together. We have encountered times where one person can’t resolve an issue and asks for help of others. Everyone in the team is willing to help and actually stepped in to resolve problems. It is easy to ignore since it’s extra work on top of my own but everyone was willing to help and work things out as team. Everyone is making honest effort and I am grateful to be in such an efficient and hardworking team and I hope that we can carry this to the end of the project with satisfactory result.