What Team?

This week we explored the aspect of collaboration in media and come of the ways we can avoid bad teamwork. Rachel covered the good and bad of group work saying many things that were pretty obvious but definitely needed to be stated. She reminded us that the media industry is predominantly a collaborative area, with most jobs forcing us to work with complete strangers at times. Because of this, the program is very teamwork based as to give us the experience to figure out how to work in different types of group dynamics.

Some key points to having good teamwork in groups is to have a lot of contact with all members on a regular basis. Whether it be to update members on information you’ve found, or to just catch up over the weekend, having communication between all participants helps develop an understanding of everyone’s capabilities, and also encourages us to be more comfortable in each others presence, which would overall improve the final product.

Another obvious but important factor in collaboration is to help each other out with problems and difficulties that anyone faces, especially if you want all members to be able to understand the final product that you create. It is not okay to just dump work onto people if you don’t understand or if you feel lazy. Everyone will most likely be getting the same mark, so might as well pull your weight and contribute as much as you can so that you get that HD.

The last factor I wanted to stress within groups is to have a solid conflict plan. In previous years I had never used this process before, but after using this a few times in my other classes I found it very beneficial in avoiding conflict within groups. If you have a solid plan of action, then when a problem arises you are free to implement the rules that the group had established and follow through with the actions necessary to complete the project. We’re all in this together, and we need to start approaching projects with more professionalism and understanding that not all members just want to chill and pass. Having a group collaboration contract helps in outlining what each members goals are and overall forces all members to be held accountable for their actions.