Collaborative Planning
Good planning can help any project. When working with a group of diverse individuals (hopefully not perverse!), you should first understand that collaborative writing is a process of organizing . The following steps will help your group efficiently begin this process:
- Identify each other's capabilities (strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes)
- Define the task clearly as a group - generally and specifically
- Structure your group as needed (a leader or moderator is always an asset)
Your group's writing process will be facilitated if you consider doing the following at your first or second meeting:
- Team Building - Spend a few minutes learning about each other. Even if you know each other, you can establish cohesion by naming your group/organization.
- Task Analysis - Conduct a general discussion of the steps involved in your procedure. You need to talk about the users too. Your goal is to create a shared vision and a clear purpose . Someone will probably be delegated to expand on these general comments, and to bring a more comprehensive list of steps to the next meeting.
- Task Management - Delegate the tasks for accomplishing your assignment. Remember, a leader can help motivate a group to stay on task.
- Identify which tasks should be done by the group, and which can be done by an individual.
- Determine the equivalency of tasks and focus on equal distribution of the work load.
- Assign the right people to the right task. This is where good team building can help. For example, if you have a strong writer in the group, then that person may be the one to step up to the editor role.
- Time Management - Schedule your group's progress. All members should have their calendars and scheduling of tasks should begin from the due date and back up to the present. Decide when you want to have the final draft due. One piece of advice - DO NOT set this date as the night before this assignment is due!
- Document Management - Determine the style and format of your final document. This may seem premature to do this at this stage of the game, but by doing this now, you will save yourself time as you begin to merge individual pieces. Talk about the word processor, font and type size, headers and footers, etc. that you will use as a group.
- Conflict Management - Be sure to poll all members of the group. Quiet people have good ideas to share. Do not let an extrovert dominate the group. Poor conflict management is one of the primary causes for groups' failing to complete the assignment.
Remember, the following three problems can cause your group to falter:
- Failing to determine the rhetorical situation
- Allowing sufficient time for revision
- Resolving the multiple voices in the document
Group or team assignments can help you prepare for problem solving in business. As one consultant put it, "Forget about writing alone in a garret: The twenty-first century works in teams." Even when you are writing or preparing a presentation by yourself, others (e.g., your manager or your colleagues) have a stake in what you produce or present. Prepare for participating in group work by paying close attention to the process the group uses: spend at least the last five minutes of every group meeting to evaluate the success of your group's process. These few minutes will help your group improve.
Creating a good working environment
Build a good relationship among group members. Team members are constant audiences for one another, and they can build good relationships by understanding one another's stakes in the team's project, by inventing roles that satisfy as many mutual needs as possible, and double checking that they understand one another.
Clarify the group's objectives. A group needs a comprehensive purpose; there has to be something for everyone to make the project attractive. Not every team member has an equal stake in every project. A particular project may be central to some students' majors or concentrations, and they would like to do exceptionally well. Other students may view the assignment as nothing more than a task in a required course. By recognizing one another's goals and defining roles, reasonable expectations can be established and realistic plans can be formulated. It is better to know in advance that one student can only make a minimal contribution to a project (perhaps because he is working part-time or has an unusually heavy course load) than to discover just before a deadline that assigned work has not been done.
Recognize one another's strengths and weaknesses -- and learn from one another. The twenty-first century requires what many management experts have called "learning organizations." Practice group learning in group project work. Most assignments offer a combination of challenges that demand several team members' skills. One part of an assignment may offer a challenge in financial analysis -- just the thing the member with a concentration in finance can address -- and another part may involve marketing. By discovering one another's strengths and learning from one another, the group can reach a consensus on how to solve problems.
Prepare for meetings as you would for any communication You should analyze the transaction and the probable roles in advance. If your group's task is to plan the project, certain roles are more likely than if the group were gathered to analyze data that had been collected since an earlier meeting.
Working in an effective group
Douglas McGregor, an industrial psychologist at M.I.T., drew up the following observations of the management of large companies to characterize a well-functioning, effective, creative group.
- The atmosphere tends to be informal, comfortable, relaxed.
- There is a lot of discussion in which virtually everyone participates, but it remains pertinent to the task of the group.
- The task or objective of the group is well understood and accepted by the members.
- The members listen to each other. Every idea is given a hearing. People do not appear to be afraid of being foolish by putting forth a creative thought even if it seems fairly extreme.
- There is disagreement. Disagreements are not suppressed or overridden by premature group action. The reasons are carefully examined, and the group seeks to resolve them rather than to dominate the dissenter.
- Most decisions are reached by a kind of consensus in which it is clear that everyone is in general agreement and willing to go along. Formal voting is at a minimum; the group does not accept a simple majority as a proper basis for action.
- Criticism is frequent, frank, and relatively comfortable.
- People are free in expressing their feelings as well as their ideas both on the problem and on the group's operation.
- When action is taken, clear assignments are made and accepted.
- Where there is a clearly defined leader, he or she does not dominate the group, nor on the contrary does the group defer unduly to him or her. In fact, the leadership shifts from time to time depending upon the circumstances. There is little evidence of a struggle for power as the group operates. The issue is not who controls but how to get the job done.
- The group is self-conscious of its own operation.
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