It is a sunny day today, a great time to write! This is my second blog to record what I have learned and experienced in the practicum project. The project is in the study of MSBA with the University of California, Davis. In this practicum, I am working with three fellow classmates over the course of the year, to practice our data skills with a real business.
In this blog, I will talk about my new learning about teamwork. Teamwork is not new to me, but through my practicum experience, I see it in a new way.
Teamwork Is Different From Group Work
Teamwork is not group work but a much deeper concept. A true team can achieve more than the sum of each team member’s effort. A team has interdependent goals. A team is joining to accomplish aligned team goals together.
From my personal work experience: If people just work as a group without alignment, then its hard for objectives to be achieved People have to have appropriate roles, to avoid duplicate work. So in our practicum team, we have our different roles. For example, my role is the Business Analyst. I mainly focus on collecting the domain and industry research. And on my team, we have a project manager and product manager, and technical manager. We have different roles so that we can contribute from different perspectives. Once we decided on a role, we can make sure that we don’t miss anything within the project. It makes us a better team because we cover the project tasks. It's just like running a good business you need different functions to fulfill different tasks. So, within our team, we built teamwork through communication and collaboration.
Being a Good Team Player
I learned to be a good team player! In my role, I contributed with my skill at researching. The project our team worked on is located in the packaging industry. None of the people in our team ever worked in packaging, so we needed to research a lot of information to get to know what are pain points for our client and why?
In my business analyst role, I was able to help the team quickly find good-quality market reports and white papers. In my research, I covered best practices and leading competitors I brought up suggestions and the team could use it to build a framework to approach the practicum project.
It helped us understand the practicum company better and understand their pain points. I learned and try to execute a great fellowship in a team of my role. I listen and work to understand my teammates and support the team leader to accomplish our plans. Stay focus to drive the forces to the team’s objective. We definitely grew as a team over the last few months and we overcome difficulties together.
Summary: What I Learned From My Team
Nobody can achieve success alone. If we want to overcome ourselves as an individual, teamwork can lead us there.
1. New ideas are important: We know everyone has their own mental walls from past experiences, but in a team, you can hear new ideas from different members, through which you can also refresh your own thoughts. In many of our team discussions, I found there are always new ideas since we have different members to look at issues in different ways. For example, when we discuss how to improve our teamwork efficiency, a new app Miro is mentioned by one of our members. That is a lovely app. We can easily share and post our ideas on it.
2. Improve efficiency together: Time is the most valuable and limited resource. In a team, by sharing tasks, we can do more work and achieve a bigger project with higher quality than we do on our own. I appreciate each of our team members about this because by support each other, we never miss any deadline even we have many projects and work tasks in parallel.
3. Mutual encouragement: There are many difficulties that come up in collaboration, such as in our project, we need to apply different analysis machine learning languages and new simulation tools to generate results. We never really used them before, so had to learn together. Encouraging teammates to put in their best work is key to getting through the challenges!
4. Teamwork can be also challenging: I am in a four people team. We have people from three different counties and two different time zones with 15 hours time-lag difference and we never met each other before. The first challenge in front is we did not know much of our team members and even hard to seek a good time to meet for discussion. We have to compromise the time by turns to make sure we can meet weekly. Then the other challenge we found is due to the very different background of us, it is not easy to get into same page understanding even we read same material or report about a business. We spend several weeks time to figure out what we are doing and why. We are glad that in the end, we get through it. It relies on a faith that all the team wants it to get through.
To sum up, for today, there is much to talk about teamwork. I will like to review it again and again in the future. Teamwork is important for everyone’s success. because we can share new ideas and learn from each other. With a team together, we can accomplish a bigger tasks together, within a limited time. Teamwork is best when a team has the trust and works in the same direction!
