Team Work

Team work is an important part in product design. Working as a team increases efficiency and you are able to do more work in a shorter space of time. In my first year I have done 1 group project and now I am in the middle of my second group project which is called DP403 and we are supposed to design a product for a specific client to help them with an issue that they are having. This project had to be filmed and edited into a 3 minute film. Now we are on to the second part of the project which involves scaling up.

How to work as a group?

Keeping in contact

Firstly it is important to keep in contact with your group members as much as you can keeping each-other updated and what is going on and what needs to be done. To do this at the beginning of the project you should share each-others information to contact each-other through different social medias such as WhatsApp, facebook, snapchat or email. This means your group members should be able to reach you on multiple platforms just incase they don’t see the first message.

Sharing information

Secondly working as a group you should always be sharing all the work and information that you have produced throughout the week. A good way to do this and how our group shares our information is with Google Drive and Google slides. It is easy to create and all you have to do is share the page with there emails. This allows you to upload images, videos or text and it will automatically upload on there computer. This is a strategical and logical way to keep on top of your group work and during this pandemic it has become very useful considering no work in person can be done. Another way to share information and keep in contact is to have a weekly teams call on your computers to discuss in person what we have done that week and what we have to do the following days.

Time management

Time management is a must when it comes to group work. In my groups I have made sure to keep time management a key priority. This means making small deadlines. When you have a task to do you give make a list and set a date when your next task needs to be completed. This makes sure that no work is left to the last minute. When working individually it is easier to give your self daily deadlines however as a group due to the lack of contact hours I have found it easier to give our group weekly objectives and then discuss what we have done at the end of the week on a teams/zoom call.

Task management

Task management is when you have a lot of work to do as a group so you have to distribute it in practical quantities and make sure that each group member is happy with the amount of work they have to do and what work it is. To make sure they are comfortable with the work they are doing it is easier to assign the type of work to the person with the most experience or skill in that subject.

Working as a team in DP403

My group

• Me – Rogan
• Alex
• Beatrix

As a group we are working together to completer DP403. At the moment we are working on the second part of the project which is to scale up our initial project and research how this product will be manufactured, the market and more. We have taken steps to make sure that we are on top of our project especially during this pandemic it is easy to fall behind.

How we keep in contact: We have a group messenger chat on facebook which is the platform we keep in contact the most. On this group we talk through our plans for the week, specify when we will have a team call and keep each other up to date and general thoughts and ideas for the project.

Sharing information: We use google slides to share information on this project. We have titled the slides “Scale up” and titled each slide on what part of the project will be posted on each slide. This makes it easier for us to share information.

Time management: We make sure that all weekly tasks must be done by Friday so we can have a team call on Saturday to sum up the work we have done.

Task management: Job titles

• Rogan: Video editor, Researcher, CAD
• Alex: Filming, CAD, Researcher
• Beatrix: Researcher, Specification