Team Connectors

Throughout our journey as a team, we have outlined some core values for ourselves and have tried to act upon them. It has been the mission of our team to value diversity and inclusion. We have spent time understanding each other’s backgrounds, experiences, etc and have turned the diversity of our team into inclusion to achieve innovation. Team members have always encouraged each other to develop and introduce new ideas and took the time to listen to them. In our team, we have valued commitment by focusing on the main purpose of the team and agreeing upon goals; by supporting each other throughout the process and giving supportive/constructive feedback. By exchanging ideas, resources and helping each other out whenever possible, our team has valued reciprocity. Collaboration – being the foundation of teamwork – has been another core value of our team. We have worked on tasks together, had brainstorming sessions, shared ideas, gave and received feedback from each other to value collaboration. The most important mission of our team has been to value respect. Everyone has tried their best to create a safe work environment by listening to each other’s ideas and opinions, respecting those ideas and using those ideas to increase the productivity of our team.

The group’s journey can be described as transformative and a great learning experience for the team about what it takes to persevere in creating a collaborative project. Our team Connectors, consisting of nine team members, have always had great team chemistry and synergy with each other as a team. We began as a group although not knowing each other, some of the group members came from the same academic departments and were pursuing similar classes together while others came from different academic fields, including computer science, mechanical engineering, Geography, Urban Studies, Theatre, Public Administration, Business and Human Resource Management. These commonalities as well as differences helped create a unique team full of team members who were open minded towards the different ideas we each would bring to the table.

Along the way we have had some challenges where we pitched different ideas to stakeholders within the community of Woburn and were unable to materialize some of the ideas, as the feedback we received mentioned that although the ideas were great they were not what was specifically looked for at this time.

Although we faced challenges, as a group, we held it together. From the moment we solidified our team, we stayed with each other through the hard times, various team mates kept encouraging us and we kept looking for different ways to work around our original ideas and try to create something new by seeking feedback from our teaching team and relying on each other to complete tasks.

We celebrated our triumphs by acknowledging each other’s strengths, such as for presentations or doing research or bringing certain tasks to fruition.

The moral to our story is perseverance. When life gives you challenges you get back up and you keep trying. This is what our group is all about, we kept encouraging each other, we sought each other’s opinions and feedback about what we can do to change the project dynamics to fit what was required from the community and we learned to adapt to the uncertainties that lay with “what if no one shows up to the workshop?”. This was a lingering question as time was limited and even on the day of the workshop there were weather elements that seemed to have posed another challenge towards “will this video be able to be uploaded after the workshop is completed?”. We still did it!

We have held weekly weekend meetings where at least 4 of us were present. Our management team helped guide us along the way by giving us feedback on how to complete tasks as well as providing information during these weekend meetings. An agenda was always prepared beforehand and minutes were taken and distributed to the team so that those who were unable to attend the meeting would be able to view what was discussed.

We were able to look at different peer feedback reviews that allowed us to reflect on the importance of considering each others strengths and we utilized this to give each other the opportunity to work in areas that we thought would be complementary to our individual skills while also acknowledging that this class is also based on learning opportunities so from there we also allowed team members to challenge themselves for example to do class presentations to help build their confidence and comfort level for future settings they may be able to utilize such an experience. This was overall a great experience! On behalf of the team we thank you C4.

Collaboration gives us an opportunity to make something better, because everything is kept in check by team members so it minimizes the chances of errors.

The biggest challenge was to update our design with the end users’ varying requirements, we used S.C.R.A.M to identify the root cause and tried to bring changes to our design.

Isaac, one of our managers, helped us to maintain our work relationship while Tammy helped us organise our work when the group was feeling demotivated by keeping at least some work going on while suspending any new changes to our plans.

And we developed a legacy plan that would address long term plans for this project as the current solution only gives relief to the existing problem but it is not a remedial solution.