Assessment: Team work and reflection

Task - You are to complete the following tasks based on the discussions and learnings from meetings held with your assigned team.  Your work should be submitted individually, and will be marked individually according to the rubric.

Part One: Project Name / Team / Description

Working as a team you are to

• Agree on a suitable team name, list all team members and provide their contact details in a professional looking document.
• Provide an overview of the project on which you are working.
• Complete a project description. This should be written clearly and concisely so that anyone unfamiliar with the project can fully understand the objectives.

Team Charter

After your team agreed on a team name and identified all of the contact details of your team members, address the following points and present them in a professional looking document:

Skills and Knowledge Inventory - List the specific knowledge and / or skills that each team member can contribute to the project. This could be technical knowledge, communication or leadership skills.

Roles and Responsibilities - Define roles and responsibilities for each team member. This can be defined for entire project or can be shared or even rotated.

Team Communications

• Meeting Times & Location - Agree on mutually convenient times and location to convene to work on the case assignments.
• Define how the team will communicate with each other and share information. Also specify how meetings will be documented and where subsequent resources will be stored for ease of access.

Team Rules & Expectations

• Discuss your previous experiences of working in teams, both positive and negative. What is the overall team goal?
• Team Values - Discuss as a team what values are important. Develop a statement or itemised list that summarises these values.
• Code of Ethics - Based on your team values, create a statement that summarises a code of ethics to guide your teams ethical behaviour.
• Rules and Expectations - Build a set of rules and expectation that all members of the team shall abide by. Consider team decisions, conflict, absence from meetings, and an individual's lack of contribution for example.

Signatures - Get each member of the team to sign the team charter. This will indicate an understanding and agreement to the rules and expectations as specified in the points above.

Part Two: Learning Cycles

Learning cycles give structure to your team meetings and accountability for when you and your team work outside of the meeting schedule

Firstly, prior to your next meeting, assign roles to the team. There should only be two central roles - the organiser and the scribe:

• Organiser - organises the meeting by writing down the team's ideas and then distributes them to the team for feedback.
• Scribe - documents the ideas and action points going forward.

Note: Roles should be rotated for each meeting and assigned so that everyone on the team has equal responsibility.

Using peer learning and reflections, document your understanding of the project at this point in time in a table format.

Note: it is likely at this early stage of the project that you will write down very few facts. You will have a few more assumptions and probably a larger list of questions to be answered. Seek answers to your questions, and show the iteration of learning cycles as you gain a deeper understanding.

Part Three: Communication Plan

As a team, brainstorm and identify all stakeholders to the project. Then individually, develop an appropriate communication plan.

Part Four: Reflection

Write a brief reflection of no more than 300 words of your team work experience in this subject. To guide your reflection you should address the following questions:

• How did your experience compare to your understanding of the leadership qualities required to successfully lead a project?
• Based on your experience, what are necessary techniques, skills, methods and ICT project manager requires in the IT profession?

Rationale - This assessment meets the following learning outcomes:

• be able to identify, critically analyse, reflect on and synthesise the key elements of the IT project management framework, including project stakeholders, communication management, the project management knowledge areas, common tools and techniques, and project success factors;
• be able to critically analyse the role of IT project management within a professional workplace, from the viewpoint of the member/leader of the project team;
• be able to research and critically evaluate how a practising IT project manager applies IT project management techniques, project management skills, methods and software tools in the IT industry;
• be able to understand and apply appropriate communication practices within a project management context;
• be able to research and apply established IT project management principles, skills and techniques to a case study.