I was enrolled in a web design course at Cornell, in which our group’s final project was to create a website for a client to meet the needs of its target audience. Our group’s personnel inputs were made up of the knowledge, experience, and skills that each member possessed. According to Kraut (2003), “It is difficult for individuals from divergent backgrounds to share a common enough language to communicate efficiently.” Since all four of us were enrolled in nearly the same courses and pursuing the same concentration, we had similar interests and worked reasonably well together. According to McGrath’s task circumplex, the task inputs of our group were mainly generative and can be split up into creative and planning. Creative tasks included the brainstorming that we did in order to determine what elements of the site needed to be changed to address the target audience of users, while the planning tasks included the problem-solving that took place in order to implement our desired layout for the site.
Our interaction processes involved communication between group members and coordination of tasks. Inter-group communication occurred frequently via e-mail, in which we offered site improvements and revisions. Initially, we had face-to-face meetings to delegate responsibilities of each group member. We divided the site into sections, and would also revise other member’s code. During face-to-face meetings with closer proximity, there was more cooperation between members in determining the design rationale. Although member contributions to the site occurred on a timely basis, more effort was put forth to accomplish our individual tasks when we were in closer proximity. However, more revisions and discussions of how to improve each other’s work occurred when there was a greater distance between one another. This is supported by Kraut (2003), who states that distributed teams may need to meet more frequently to communicate and work more effectively. When we met in person to discuss our progress, there was a higher degree of conformity with each other’s reasoning than during communication via e-mail.
At the completion of our website, each member’s needs were still met to an extent, since we could all incorporate our own perspectives into the overall design and layout of the website. We were all very pleased with the website’s end result, which strengthened our group maintenance. All the members of our group as well as our client agreed that we constructed a fully functional website that was very well-designed for the target audience of users.
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You said that everyone in your group was in basically the same classes, which the same concentrations and interests. This means that your group must have been pretty homogeneous. So now I'm wondering how your experience might have differed if your group was more heterogeneous. Would your group have got along as well?
ReplyDeleteI also thought that it was interesting that when your group was in the same place, you focused more on accomplishing individual tasks, but when you were in different places, you focused on revisions and discussions on how to improve each others work. I definitely thought this would have been the other way around. I would have thought that people would accomplish individual tasks more when they were alone, and that you would discuss improvements about the group when you were together. Was there a particular reason for that?
I'm actually not particularly surprised that when you all got together you worked on individual tasks. I'm beginning to see that groups with the task of software development tend to have unique behavior. For one, I find coding to generally be an individual process. While software development is collaborative, the actual coding is done solo. Also, I would go as far as to say programmers may interact with others more comfortably via a computer rather than face to face (not a blanket statement, but definitely true in many cases).
ReplyDeleteYou mention that there was more cooperation in Ftf meetings with group members. This is probably related to reduced cues and the latency that results from CMC or other types of collaborative technologies. I think it would be interesting to see if it is possible to use a combination of existing technologies to achieve the same level of efficiency or if there is some intrinsic difference in communication when distance is a factor.
ReplyDeleteTo build a little on what Eric said about software development, is it because of the current tools and technology that makes it an individual process?