Final Post

March 25, 2019


  • Your impressions of working in a virtual team (including whether or not you would wish to do so again)
Working in virtual teams is something I have come to enjoy. It is a method of group work that I find myself to prefer over 'face-to-face' meeting. I look forward to working in virtual teams in my future career and hope the experience I have gained from UCF will help me to be successful in doing so. 
  • New skills you developed during the course of the project
 Sadly, I do not think I learned any new skills during this course project. My part was extremely small and presented no ability to develop my experience or skills I may already have. 
  • A brief description of the leadership structure in your team and an evaluation of how effective the team leadership was
 Our group suffered from a lack of clear leadership. While there were a couple of students who seemed to just 'take over', there were no true roles established. The entire project was derailed by poor communication and delegation. 
  • The project management tools your team used
 Another hard one seeing as our group seemed to have no clear distinction of good communication. While a Google Drive was made for our documents, I can not think of any specific tools that were utilized for project management. Our group relied on frustratingly long and numerous email chains that only made things more confusing. The Google Hangouts resource was not utilized to the full extent it should have been, in my opinion. 
  • The stages at which writers and translators collaborated and the tools you used to collaborate
 There was very little collaboration between the translators and writers. This step seemed to just happen and the lack of good communication simply carried over between this phase. 
  • Any elements of the process that gave you scope to work creatively and any tools that aided your creativity
Again, sadly to the very little piece I contributed I did not get the opportunity to work creatively or use tools that would have aided to this creativity.  
  • The most valuable things you learned from doing the project
The most valuable thing I will take away from this experience is to be more diligent in future groups that may present communication issues and attempt to fix them. 
  • Things you would do differently in future projects, if any
 Consult with my professor in how to deal with the problems our group experienced. I would attempt to better communicate my frustrations and concerns with my fellow group members. 
  • Your motivations during this project (e.g. sense of achievement, sense of responsibility, contribution to the teamwork, getting a good grade)
Throughout this process, I became detached and unmotivated because of the lack of responsibility my team gave me. My contribution was extremely minimal and left me frustrated that our UL students did not include us more. The project seemed to be taken over by the UL students and things were done without consultation or delegation. Parts of the project were completed without even consulting the other members or including them in the work. My biggest fear throughout this project is if my grade will suffer in the end because of my lack of contribution. There were several instances where my fellow UCF group member offered to take on different tasks only to be completely ignored. There was no communication about how the project would be broken down for each member to contribute fairly. This whole process was very frustrating and upsetting. Given that last semester, I was a student who carried my entire group through our project to now being a member who was almost 'shunned' was a depressing experience. I know my fellow UCF members had the same frustrations and concerns throughout the process and could not 'get through' to the UL members. As stated in earlier posts, I do not find fault in the project itself, I simply think that our group was doomed by a lack of good communicators and 'work sharers'. 

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