Individual Reflections

Will

I think our team worked well together. We worked efficiently, everyone completed their tasks, and group meetings were very productive. One thing that could have been improved is the GitHub system. When using branches, we found there were way too many conflicts, making it a real hassle to commit updates to the code. To resolve this, we tended to communicate in team chat if someone was working on the code to avoid too many conflicts occurring.

Something surprising was how creative everyone was with their ideas! It was fantastic to work with people who all have their own unique ways of thinking and doing things and then bringing that together in this assignment. This also provided a great platform to meet other people with similar passions to myself, and I found it a valuable learning opportunity, learning from my other team members capabilities. Something I learnt about working as a team is how important communication is. It is vital to attend meetings and produce the work I have completed. By maintaining momentum both individually and as a team, we can ensure we are all making progress and looking ahead at future tasks.

Jarrad

Our group was well formed from the beginning. William and Parth were the 2 who originally decided to get together and ‘recruited’ the others so to speak. They did this based on the activity of the members, only choosing people who were active on the weekly webinars and who were contributing towards the discussion boards. This led to an active group with high productivity.

We had our first meeting one week before the submission of the previous assignments deadline and started to get the ball rolling early. From there we had a bit of quiet period in which not much communication happened, and this is where we could improve for next time, about 10 days later we organized the second meeting and got a start on the assignment properly. From that date communication has improved drastically and targets have been achieved consistently.

Moving forward to subsequent assignments I hope to keep the pace and communication that we have now and to further progress in this aspect. This is my first adult study class, and it was surprising to me the level of dedication by fellow students. I am also very grateful to be working with a group who have a passion for completing the work to a high standard.

Renee

As a group, I think we have worked quite well together. In the beginning I noticed a change in group dynamics as we all started to get to know one another. Jarrad became chair of most of the meetings which worked well. His mannerism kept us all on track throughout and we were all given opportunities to raise concerns or express our opinions.

Communication early on could have been enhanced multiple ways. Initially we should have scheduled meetings after our first meeting and created a GitHub repository to establish a starting point. I also feel as though I have let the team down by running into a few technical difficulties on my GitHub page. This made it difficult for my team members to extract specific data within jobs roles and trying to complete their tasks too. I was thankful to everyone who helped me troubleshoot this and offer guidance.

Overall, I think we have a great team and each of us have a different type of skill set that complemented one another’s. I am looking forward to our next project together and expanding on our skill set, increasing our communication and applying this to achieve an overall grade that we are each proud of.

Jacqueline

I think that this team has great potential. Everyone in the group is collaborative in nature; there hasn’t been any case of someone being left behind or not putting in effort. We have all worked to be adaptive and driven in terms of getting the necessary delegated work done, which has been a great experience.

Improvements for next time could include keeping a clearer ‘to-do’ regime, however this isn’t detrimental as everyone has done a great job keeping track of their own tasks. Although Jeremy and I were latecomers to the group, everyone was welcoming and ready to get the ball rolling. I was surprised at just how detail-oriented everyone has been. We’ve all put in a massive effort to keep things organised, clean and consistent, and we’ve done a great job staying productive and involved.

I’ve learnt that working within a team with other likeminded individuals can be a great asset to not only our work and our grade, but our overall study experience. I look forward to working with Team HydroKnow in the future.

Jeremy

I believe the team meetings were productive and improved as we progressed. Initial meetings involved open discussion of overall requirements of the task, which was particularly helpful with a task involving several disparate components. As we progressed, meetings shifted to updates of individual member’s progress, and seeking help from the group on issues they encountered which encouraged everyone to stay productive.

Between scheduled meetings, there was naturally still a requirement for coordination between members, either to answer ad hoc queries, or requiring submissions from other members. We tended to use Teams posts/comments for this coordination, but I felt these requests were difficult to keep track of at times and could have benefited from greater use of task assignment and tracking tools.

Towards the end of the project, with the pressure of the deadline approaching, I was surprised to see that the group’s collaborative efforts and assistance with other members really seemed to strengthen. Despite everyone having their individually assigned components to work through, there was a very strong commitment to help each other out, offering suggestions, looking at code and design elements.

Tying into the research on personality types and their influence on a group, this assignment has demonstrated to me the strength that a team can gain with a varied cross-section of personalities. I think our group each brought different strengths, which contributed to the overall success of the project.

Parth

Overall the project idea was well thought out. We had looked into all of our personal ideas and we ended up casting a vote and ended up with a really good idea, which in this case was Will’s idea.

I could definitely improve my part of the project, maybe add a little more than what I have, contribute and add more content. I don’t think there was any time there was any miscommunication. All meetings were scheduled on time.

One thing I was surprised about is how quickly and efficiently we accomplished this. With the group work that we had I reckon that we tackled it in an efficient manner.

One new thing that I have learnt about in our group assignment. Is that you definitely have to pull your weight by this I mean that everyone has to do their assigned tasks on time. If this is delayed then it can affect the timeline and how each tasks are completed. We could also refer to it as a domino effect What this means is that if one person starts falling behind the next person would then be affected by it and so on and so forth.

Group Reflection

Being a member and a part of HydroKnow has been an overall enjoyable and rewarding experience for each of us. As Jarrad mentioned earlier, our group found its feet quite quickly and after a couple of team member shuffles we began to communicate early on. The founding members of the group, Will and Parth, used their initiative by recruiting the most active individuals based on discussion posts and weekly live lectures. The implementation of this method worked in Will and Parth’s favor and us as a team.

At the beginning of forming HydroKnow, we admit there was a communication lull after our first meeting and reflecting on this, we could have utilised this time more effectively. We have taken this on board as a learning opportunity. Communication via teams worked well towards the end of week 5, 6 and 7. Frequent communication mishaps were corrected in the early days by simply just tagging/ mentioning one another in the comments left on the Microsoft Teams posts page. Certain days showed a decrease in activity and therefore altering our meeting days was necessary.

We all discussed the requirements from specific tasks and created an approach within the team. This consisted of delegating the large aspects of the assignment to ensure research on these areas was quickly achieved. As we began learning more about one another, it was clear that we are all like-minded individuals who have created a positive study experience overall.

Our communication throughout the end of the assignment has been excellent, we have informed one another when unable to attend meetings, added topics in the meeting minutes to later discuss and provided one another feedback where appropriate. This communication has enabled us to work collaboratively as a team and individually apply our strengths to meet our specific skill set, whether it was writing content or pushing and pulling commits on GitHub. Each of our contributions has since led to an organised, clean, and consistent project pathway as Jacqui mentioned above.

Throughout this experience and within many teams in any environment, there can be team members that may contribute more than others. Reflecting on this, we knew it would be easier for those members with busier schedules to complete the tasks that were less tedious. Our group members consist of diverse backgrounds with some being mature age with a young family and others are at the beginning of their new careers. We have each held one another to a high regard as each of us strives to achieve high expectations of ourselves.

As two members were having difficulties with their GitHub pages, Renee and Parth, this made it challenging to all share one another’s content. This had a somewhat negative impact on the rest of the team as this aspect was something that should have been produced from assignment one a few weeks earlier. Luckily, Renee was both able to rectify this, which in turn made it easier for us all.

One of the revelations we had as a group was the ease and simplicity that Microsoft Teams offered us. Collaborating on this platform was straightforward, easily learnt and provided us with the ability to store our group work in a very organised way. This platform managed our individual tasks, set reminders and we were able to update each other when something was achieved, formatted and ready for our repository.

Moving forward, the six of us have now established a solid foundation to improve on areas that we may have overlooked in the previous tasks. After the submission, creating an open forum to discuss potential areas for improvements is something that will be of great benefit to us all. We all agree on the fact that we may have left the GitHub side of things a little later than we should have by focusing on the content perhaps more than we anticipated. This is a valuable learning opportunity that we can all grow from. As Renee indicated, we hope to continue this level of communication when collaborating on our next group task.