Effective project management relies heavily on a robust teamwork strategy. By leveraging the strengths of each team member and ensuring seamless collaboration, projects are more likely to succeed. This page will outline the teamwork strategy used in the project, examining what worked well, what didn’t, and providing constructive recommendations for improvement.

Teamwork Strategy

Having a defined strategy for teamwork becomes more important as the size of the team increases. Hence, for a two-person project, being fluid in our roles and responsibilities was both acceptable and effective as long as communication was maintained. Having worked together before there was already familiarity with the working patterns of the other person allowing for a seamless start to the project. GitHub was the prescribed method of documenting the project progress and this aided teamwork as it was always clear what work has been completed and so repeating or omitting work was unlikely. Based on the respective strengths of the team, we took ownership of broad areas of the project, with Alex responsible for coding and Harry responsible for hardware. As the project developed, help was provided both ways and collaborative work on testing was undertaken.

What Worked

Effective communication – the majority of our work was done in the same room allowing the project aims to always stay at the forefront of our thoughts, and troubleshooting between team members to be natural and rapid.

Specialization – having sole responsibility of particular aspects of the project allowed work to be done in parallel and strengths of the team to be utilised.

Collaborative tools – GitHub was a major factor that allowed teamwork to remain effective. Code was easily shared and proof reading was simple, it eliminated the friction of sharing documents and giving feedback.

Team Morale – Helped by the continued progress of the project, we had strong motivation throughout. We also struck a balance between discussion about the task at hand and personal conversation that resulted in optimum performance.

What Didn’t Work

The only problem we encountered was having times where one individual’s work became a critical task, and the other person was therefore less productive until it was finished. This occurred most frequently with coding such as after the circuitry was set up and before testing commenced. This could have been resolved with planning parallel tasks or thinking further ahead in the project, however this proved difficult due to the constantly evolving nature of the work.

Recommendations

Anticipating potential critical tasks and how progress could be made in parallel would have been useful, but overall it did not prove to be limiting.

Interface with Ben Moore

Ben Moore was the project liaison and provided great support throughout. We would like to thank him for his advice, time and resources. Having a clear and achievable goal provided by Ben gave clarity to the project and improved drive throughout knowing that the work will be useful and impactful if completed to a high standard.