What I Have Enjoyed and Learned
While working on this project, I really enjoyed the teamwork that I had with the team members that actually participated working on this team project. We clearly didn’t had a team leader since it was both me and Zofia that were deciding on what each of us will do as the project kept going and helping each other with those things, but I enjoyed working on team this way since everyone who worked had the same duties and been doing research, designs, shared ideas and critiques. Though I feel like team leader would have helped in such situations where there was mostly only me and Zofia, since there was no third opinion for someone to agree or disagree on and some ideas were took forward that I wasn’t fully agreeing with while some ideas that I believed were better got discarded too. Despite this, I believe I had to push myself and try more things to see how they look instead of just trusting the idea I had initially only since I had to present on how the thing actually looked if I wanted to show it’s a good idea to rest of my team. I do believe it might be this way in industry as well where someone presenting the idea should already have a visual for it, so it’s easier for everyone to decide.
Participation and Organisation
I was always participating in team discussions and providing the ideas and helping to organise some workflow and take on some tasks for instance team lineup since one of the members that was meant to do it, couldn’t. Despite these problems, I wanted our project to be as professional as possible and not to bring team issues to the client since this wouldn’t be a case in job environment. No one in this scenario would care who contributed and how much other people have done towards the project and the best possible outcomes would be expected when it comes to design. I was also responsible for some of the team meetings as I have been organising them and making sure that everyone is able to attend which wasn’t the case as some people choose to ignore it even after pinging them.
I’ve been providing my feedback at all times possible when it came to other team members design proposals and adjustments. I even had some sessions with Zofia where I particularly been helping to figure out what to do with the poster design since it was quite last time and some feedback I have been giving to Ford haven’t been taken forward. We still wanted to maintain the same feeling of the poster design to not take away from his contribution.
I also been helping with trying to pick colours for certificates over zoom and providing general feedback on that part on WhatsApp as well and shared some of my concerns regarding composition and layout.
Another thing worth mentioning is that the language I have been developing with social media posts was later used for posters etc, even though shapes was taken from the logo, we only started to make it this playful after social media initial ideas.
Time Management
When it comes to time management, I was always doing the tasks as we have agreed on the time together and been giving myself some additional deadlines to do a particular graphic for separate social media post. I feel like this has helped me to stay on track with the rest of the project. While I was writing down tasks I have to do or just making a plan for the day in my head it has helped me to be as productive as possible, though I’m sure I should have documented some of it, but I found out that I always have a very similar system on how I will be approaching particular tasks whether it’s researching particular deliverable to figure out the key points that go on that design or it’s the time which I will be using trying out and testing some ideas. The most important thing here is to try and do rather than just sit and try to think of something and this is something that I have learned from the previous projects during this source. I do believe this method helps me to stay more productive.
Another thing to point out, when it comes to team projects especially I don’t like to leave things on the last minute since there is a team that is relying on me, so managing my time was really important here even though I felt like we had less of it than most teams since we had to design more outcomes than intended.
Concerns
Since this project hasn’t been done by all 6 team members like in most teams, I felt like this is where we lost some time with our work since we had to work on more outcomes per person. While we were having each other, I think it added additional stress as some good ideas haven’t been heard or used due to this lack on time on each of the outcomes, but it’s all a part of teamwork and negotiation with the team.
The other concern is that we have tried to reach out and communicate with the rest of the team many times, but I also decided to add some screenshots of that just for the peace of mind.
The last concern is that when we have put all of our participation on each deliverables I noticed that I wasn’t included in some of them even though I have been sharing thoughts and critique when it came to posters and certificates, so it felt like I wasn’t heard or remembered as much for some reason.
Despite all of these concerns, we still have managed to do our work in timely manner for the presentation for the client.
Conclusion
Overall, I have enjoyed the whole experience of this project since it helped me to understand better that not everything always goes according to plan when it comes to working with the team and in the professional environments. Despite all of this I didn’t let to affect my work as much as possible and kept working on tight deadlines, but I also felt like if we had that extra time or more team members participating, my final designs would have been better as I could have spent more time on it without needing to go back and forth with the tasks. One of the other things that I would like to mention is that I enjoyed to work on a team were everyone who was working on it shared their ideas, gave feedback and provided support while also helped to manage time. Since we didn’t had a team leader, taking some tasks on some tasks voluntarily was a good way to go about it without adding additional stress to anyone who was working on it and I believe it ensured a stable workflow.
Things learned: working under unforeseen circumstances and still managing to remain calm and manage the workflow with the team as a part of collaborative work, negotiating on the ideas and selecting the most appropriate to the client as per industry expectations, developed a skill to maintain a friendly and supporting environment to the rest of the team members and still try to provide the help and guidance needed even when some of them weren’t participating as much.
