A3: Team Project

Assignment Introduction

By now you should have some basic familiarity with the other members of your group. Charting out a preliminary plan for the quarter likely revealed some details about the schedules of your teammates and at least of a few of their broader interests in life. This is a great start, but only one small part of cultivating a healthy team dynamic. Typically, when a new project starts a team is going to need to identify its strengths and weaknesses. But before you are ready to journey down that path, you need to spend some time establishing trust. While the Communication Covenant is useful for holding team members accountable, the trust that the your covenant is built on must emerge through the bonds that you make with one another. So for this assignment, you will first work on building trust, then take the first steps to developing your project for the quarter.

Assignment Details

To get started, create a new document in your group’s stage directory and name it TEAMNAME-assignment-3-team-project. Ensure that your course instructors have edit permissions.

A great way to build trust is through social (non-work) interaction. Rather than dive into a stressful task, making time to get to know one another in a casual context will help establish a bond within your team that you can build upon for the rest of the quarter. So the first thing you will do for this assignment is make plans to do something social. It doesn’t matter what you do. Meet up between classes and throw a frisbee, get lunch, or just sit at a table and chat about your goals for the year. Your only requirement is that you choose to do something genuine. In other words, don’t simply meet before class and take a selfie!

Part 1: Group Photo

For the first part of this assignment, all that is required is that you create visual evidence of your social activity. Make a video or take a photo of the event. Make sure everyone is present in the photo.

Part 2: Secure Work

Once you have had a chance to get to know each other socially, it’s time to get to work. You might want to meet again (or add this part onto the end of your social activity) or use your preferred communication tool to start to plan out your project for the quarter. For this part of the assignment you will secure work for the quarter.

If you are a startup, then you must find a consultancy or agency to help you in some capacity. If you are a consultancy or agency, then you must either find a startup to work with or pursue a project for an external organization (club on campus, faculty lab, local organization).

Once you have secured work, you need to communicate to your investor (TA) how that work will sustain you for the next ten weeks. A brief overview of the work you plan on carrying out should suffice. However, be aware that if your work description is too small, your investor may require you to find more work. For example, if you secure work to create a logo for one startup and you have an agency of six people, your investor will ask you to go out and find more work.

Your work overview is NOT a business case (you will write a complete business case for assignment 4), rather it is a clear and concise explanation of the project(s) your team will pursue this quarter. You are not expected to know everything yet, so don’t get hung up on specific details like implementation, features, requirements, etc.

Submitting

Once you have completed both parts 1 and 2, submit a link to your Google doc to the Assignment 3 page on Canvas. Remember, you should always start your materials in the stage folder and only put them in the final folder when you are ready to submit.

Ensure that all course staff have been added as members of your group directory and have edit permissions on your documents.

Grading

This assignment is worth 3 pts or 3 percent of your total grade. You must complete all requirements for this assignment accurately and on time to receive credit. No partial credit will given. Credit will be assigned to you as a group but removed on an individual basis for team memebrs who do not complete part 2.