The impact of Team Dynamics on my projects in CmpE 202 course

What Are Team Dynamics? This is the first question I asked myself repeatedly before writing this short essay. Team Dynamics are factors which play a key role in a team, if involved in a team there will be no way the Team is going to fail. I mean if the Project took up by the team may fail but the effort put by the team will not go futile. This means that the effective team members make a dynamic team.

Initially, I was very ambiguous about what should be written about Team Dynamics as I have no idea about it and The Professor also had not mentioned any insinuations about Team Dynamics in the class. The Team Dynamic Information provided by the Professor had good detailed information which explained elements of Team Dynamics like Full Participation, Trust, Open Communication, Clear Roles, Quality Control and Risk-Taking.

It is said that “Team Dynamics are the unseen forces that operate in a team between different groups of people”. Yes, I do accept this statement. This fact has been playing a key role in our team anonymously whenever we used to go for a voluntary meeting to meet the Professor to discuss about our projects.

Our Team named "Pinnacle" consists of 5 members. All of the members were from different parts of India. It was a completely novice and different experience working in a Team for the Projects. There were initially 4 members in our Team as preferred by The Professor. But, eventually one member got into our team on our voluntary decision as he was standing alone. We thought if 5 members were there it would make our work easy. But, it did not happen as we thought as he turned out to be a good Reflector.

The Forming Stage of our Team did not took a long time as we already had acquaintance before the Formation of the Team as we had met in another course before enrolling into Cmpe-202 Course . But, when the fifth member got added into the team we did needed some time to get acquainted with him. Our Team was fortunate so as to say, we did go well with Storming, Norming and Performing Phases of the Project.

Every Project much have well defined Goal, otherwise what is the purpose of a Project. Our goals and deadlines were pre-defined by our Professor which made our team work much easier. As most of the Team members were good initiators, Facilitators, and optimists we did not have any problem doing our work together.

Our Project #1 dealt with the traditional model of our Problem Statement “Integrated Water Management”. Project #2 is Stability model which dealt with EBTs, BOs and IOs. Project #3 was Patterns Design and Analysis.I really enjoyed working on all the three Projects, but I personally felt Project#3 to be very interesting and challenging where I have kept a little more effort in it.

For Project #1, we did lack in our Team Work which eventually resulted in a bad grade. The Team also lacked discussions with the Professor and met the professor only once to discuss about the Project. After seeing our results of Project # 1 we felt that we need to be more optimistic on Our Project#2 which deals with stability model of our Problem “Integrated Water Management”. The Team had also given good effort in Project # 3.

The impact of project #2 traditional models on team dynamics:

The Project #2 Traditional Models was nothing but doing the Traditional Model of Project#1 with Stability Model involved in it which included EBTs, BOs and IOs. To do project#2 as an Individual is a waste of Work as We needed to find three ultimate goals (EBTs) for our Problem Statement. We did open communication with each other to find the ultimate Goals. We find some of them and discussed them with our Professor. We proceeded further upon Professors Suggestion.

Our Team Had Good Initiators to start the Project and all the Team members were optimistic in taking decisions. We followed Object Oriented Heuristics suggested by our Professor in his weekly lectures. His lectures helped us a lot in doing the work for the Project. By the way none of our Team members ever missed a single lecture of the course in the semester.

For Traditional model, we had to sit together to discuss about Each Use case and discuss about the various classes involved in each use cases, their corresponding attributes and Corresponding Interfaces. Without Team Effort we cannot decide on the interfaces and Attributes.

Quality Assurance or Reviewing played a key role in the Project #2. If three of the members used to sit together and document Traditional Model two used to review that everything is going on well with the Project. That is, there was no chance of us making a minor mistake in the project. Thus, I can conclude that there were many lessons learnt from Traditional Model and it had a good impact on Team Dynamics.


The impact of projects #2 & #3 stability models on Team Dynamic:

The Project #2 and Project # 3 involved stability models and patterns to be designed. Again I need to mention that without Total Participation, open Communication and Quality Assurance it is impossible to do these Projects. I was fortunate that I had a team which does not conflict with menial things. The main problem we faced doing Stability model is that we had to find EBTs for BOs depending upon the object given. But, with the Open communication with our Professor we got good aid in finding the ultimate goals for the Stability Model.

Determining the Examples for each pattern was pretty tough but our team work has helped in doing the Job well. Thus, I conclude that Stability Model had a good impact on the Team Dynamics on our Team.