Background

Being in a well-functioning team is paramount to achieving good results. Below is presented the basics on how we expect students to get organised when working in teams.

Teams work differently and different goals will also affect affect how a team should act. The most important part is that everyone continuously

• knows what is most important now
• knows what is my current/next task
• keeps a high level of communication
• align expectations

In the ITT setting, we might and might not appoint a project manager. Since students don’t have formal power over each other, that role is mostly a point of contact for teachers and other groups.

A note on tasks

A task is a concrete piece of work that need to be done as part of the project. Define all tasks as SMART tasks.

Why SMART tasks? At least to avoid this

Googling will give you different meanings to the letters in SMART, but the essense is that

• you know what is expected to be done
• it is something the you can readily do
• you know when you are done and when’ish
• you have a good idea of the effort you need to put into it
• it is something that is in line with what you try to achieve

We normally recommend tasks to be around 1 hour of work. This is a good number, since it will show traction every day and make it possible for teams to react in a timely manner to misunderstandings and other task related issues.

Getting organised and defining the project

This ends up in a document that all team members agree upon.

1. Team members

   Make a list of who is in the team along with contact information like email adresses, facebook links, riot usernames and the like, depending on you prefered means of communication.

2. Social aspects

   In order to work together in an effective manner, some level of mutual understanding is necesary. In the group agree upon questions like:

   • When are you avilable?
   • When are you physically present?
   • How do you inform of absence?
   • What workload and workhours are agreeds upon?
   • How do you handle non-compliance?
   • How and when may you ask for help?
   • When must you ask for help?

   Having discussed and agreed upon the basic social rules for your group will prevent a lot of issues before they arize.

3. Decide on communication channels

   How do you communicate on a daily basis? face-to-face in the same room, using facebook, texting?

   Different communication channels have different properties, eg. verbal discussion are quick and easy, emails are good for documentation. Chose channels that are appropriate for your way of working and you goals.

   You must have a formalised forum where you meet regulary and decide on thing. This may be a 10 minute standing at the start of the day, but it must have some formalised structure.

   All have meetings have agenda - this one include - and you must take minutes, and put them where you decided to put those kinds of documents.

4. Decide on documentation

   You will be creating documents, minutes of meeting, reports, test results and so on. You must decide where to put this and how to structure it.

5. Tasks workflow

   Answer the following questions:

   1. who creates tasks

      The first set of tasks should be made in the group, and then you should be allowed to make tasks continuously as you see issues arise. Tasks are also created when you mis-estimate the time need for a tasks, and decides to spilt it into mulitple smaller tasks.

   2. who assigns tasks and how

      It comes highly recommended that people “claim” tasks instead of being “assigned” tasks. This is part of a long discussion on feeling ownership, which is out-of-scope here.

      Which task to do next is an important questions, and it is suggested to confer with other group memeber before claiming and starting the next task.

      Note that people can only work on one thing at any given time, so having multiple assigned tasks is either a sign of trouble or that tasks are pending ie. waiting for someone external.

   3. how do mark that someone is working on a task

      Marking a tasks as assigned is about writing your name on it and moving it to “in progress”. This is either a physical thing with post-its or something built into your chosen management software.

   4. how do you know when a task is done

      Since all tasks are SMART tasks, this is included in the tasks definition

   5. how do you inform the team that a task is done

      E.g. can you be done with a task, that leaves the system in an unusable state?

      This is about the definition of done, the quality assurance ot wheterever else you wich to call it. You must decide on what kind of testing and documentation must go into task done.

6. Phases or milestones

   There will be logical division in your project the may be exploited to feel a sense of completion, review with project owner, or other project related phases, you want to use.

   A project will most likely always start with some kind of planning phase, perhaps a research and planning phase. This is where you do the work described above and define the actual tasks and phases of the project.

   A phase will include tasks. We recommend that a week worth of work is good for en education setting. A quick calculation yields that a group of 3-4 people, working to days per week should aim for 20-25 tasks per week.