Collaboration

    Some things are just to big to be accomplished by one person; that is when we turn to the power of the group. We use it to break down work into smaller manageable chunks for the individual.  No one person can do everything for every project nor do they have the time. The field of mechanical engineering is not an exception, nor is our group project of redesigning a website for class. Through some quick research and a lot of personal experience in groups, the keys to a successful group can be broken up into four parts: establishing an organizational pattern, separating work, establishing communication, and recombining efforts.

    The first step that should be taken in any sort of group work or collaboration should be establishing the organizational style of the group and the roles of the individuals. This may be done explicitly such as someone being named group leader and others being formally put into other positions. It can also be done implicitly where there is no formal leader and everyone just naturally fills a role. This implicit form of organization was that our group chose for our redesign project. We all naturally filled roles and there was no established positions. This would probably only work for smaller groups though.

    Once the organization has formally or informally established, it is about this time that the work gets separated. Again this can be done directly by whomever is in charge at this point or it can be done indirectly where everyone just starts working on different things. You have to be careful if it is done indirectly to make sure nothing gets forgotten since there is less organization that way. Our group never explicitly assigned pieces of the proposal until the very end of the assignment to avoid forgetting something. We have a shared Google Doc open in which we all work on parts of it as we have free time and motivation, all while using our group text to communicate and adding comments throughout the document.

    That is where communication comes in. This is probably the most important part in group collaboration. There has to be some way to communicate inside the group. This can be a group text, a chat system, group meetings, emails or some combination thereof. Our group opted for a group text to communicate as this was the most natural, and we also used group meetings in class to help communicate goals. We also left notes inside the shared document that shared suggestions, concerns, and work to be done.

    The last part should be the recombination of work. The most likely situation is that at some point the group had either individuals or subgroups working on different tasks, so the naturally everything must be brought back together and made whole. This can only be done if communication has been kept up and goals are set. There also needs to be a time frame for this set up since multiple pieces have to be brought together at this point. Our group tends to meet a few minutes before class or meeting to go over everything.