Set Up Your Teams

Please use the following link to set up your teams: click here to access the document. The teaching team will use this information to update our course website so that we can better facilitate the grading of team deliverables. Please ensure that your team name is professional. List the first and last names of each team member. A team can have a minimum of 3 team members and a maximum of 4 team members. Please ensure that you enter your team under the appropriate lab section (as indicated on your course schedule). Further, every team member must be from the same lab section.

Regardless of your intended or actual career, you will likely work on a team at some point in your life. And while working on a team can be frustrating, it also has plenty of benefits. In particular, teams with a diversity of knowledge, experiences, and training have been shown to produce better results than those that do not, because diversity helps mitigate inherent biases and prevent tunnel vision that might limit our ability to see a fundamental flaw in the work we are doing.

Of course, it isn’t easy to work on a team; it takes interpersonal skills and self-awareness. Kindness, empathy, and patience also help.

So how do we improve our chances that our teams will be effective? First and foremost, working effectively requires time and careful consideration. And while it’s very likely that when you sit down with your team you are going to want to dive into solving our community partner’s problem, it’s best that you don’t do that. It’s far more effective and productive to outline how you are going to work as a team and to set roles, responsibilities, and expectations.

With this in mind, review the following tips for effective teamwork before you do anything. This will include outlining a specific set of expectations for yourself and your team, and importantly, how you might assess yourself and your teammates’ performance and contributions to each of the labs and course deliverables.

Tips for Working as a Team

• Set Goals: Figure out where you need to go and how you are going to get there. Try not to make it too specific. In CIS4020, we want you to focus first on the problem, not on the specific solution.
• Establish Rules: Identify ways of working together such that you are all accountable and all able to meet expectations. Determine, well in advance, what the consequences of positive and negative behaviour will be.
• Communicate: Don’t wait until your scheduled meetings to update each other, especially if they are infrequent. Develop a system of keeping each other updated on your activities and of providing feedback.
• Define Roles: As a group, come up with specific assignments for each member of the team, whether they be individual, or assigned to more than one person. Establish specific deadlines for each milestone. Ensure you have time as a team to review and constructively critique the work that has been completed.
• Clarify: Once you have agreed upon a process or an objective, go around the team and ask everyone to restate what was agreed to. This will ensure that everyone is on the same page.
• Keep Minutes: Take notes at every meeting and every time you work independently. Document what you’ve done, how you did it, and what you will do next. Perhaps create a shared document with the meeting notes.
• Stick to the Plan: Do not change course without the specific and unanimous decision of the team.

Setting Your Goal

When you sit down as a team to set your goal, your aim is to hit just the right amount of specificity. Like Goldilocks and her decisions related to what to eat, where to sit, and which bed to sleep in, your aim is to set a goal that is just right. That is, your goal shouldn’t be so specific that it makes a huge amount of assumptions related to the software you are going to develop. It also shouldn’t be so broad and vague that it lacks clarity.

Instead, you want to develop a goal that every member of the team can use to verify that what they are doing is helping to achieve the goal. It’s very easy to get sidetracked and distracted, so your goal statement helps keep everyone focused.

Setting a goal that the team agrees on is only one piece of working effectively on a team, and for this reason, it’s a good idea to develop a contract that sets expectations (and consequences for failing to meet those expectations), member roles, timelines, standards, communication tools, etc. For CIS4020, your team contract will also include a rubric that describes how you will evaluate yourself and your team members should it be necessary.

Developing A Team Contract

A team contract needs to be established early and quickly by the entire team. This isn’t to say that the contract can’t be modified or expanded, but you want to set up some ground rules that everyone understands so that you can begin working on the project knowing how you’re going to do that.

Before you meet with your team you should answer the following questions. The questions and your answers will help facilitate the development of your team contract.

How are you going to communicate? Will you meet face to face? Will you have a regular weekly meeting? Will you use Slack/Discord? Will you use Google Docs? Who’s responsible for setting up and managing the tools you are going to use?

What are your benchmarks? How will you measure success? Consider the course deliverables (e.g. assignments, lab demos) and how they’ll be accomplished. Will your team spread the work over the time you have to complete it, or will you work to the deadline with most of the work happening closer to the due date? Does each student have to submit their contributions by a particular date? If so, what happens if they can’t?

How will you manage challenges? What happens when one person isn’t pulling their weight or is sick for a prolonged period? Will someone else take on their responsibilities?

How will you manage disagreements? We can’t nor should we always agree on everything. However, it’s important to consider how you will address team disagreements. Is there veto power? Are decisions made democratically, or is someone appointed with final decision-making authority?

How often will you revise your team contract? Your team contract might work in theory, but when you actually get down to work you may realize it’s not quite making the grade. How will you address this? Will the team redevelop the contract? How will this happen? Will this require a unanimous decision, or will it require a simple majority? Whatever the case, it’s a good idea to write down your contract and have each team member sign it.

Developing A Team Rubric

As part of CIS4020, you may be required to submit evaluations for yourself and each member of your team. Of course, creating a rubric isn’t as easy as it seems. It depends on what you and your team value, and what your minimum expectations are for you and your team members.

There are numerous ways to evaluate the contributions of the members of the team; attendance, the quantity of output, the quality of output, following the Wil Wheaton Law, timeliness of deliverables, following the team contract, meeting expectations, successfully completing the tasks to which they were assigned, demonstrated improvement in some area, etc. It’s up to you and your team to determine what is important to you.

To help you do this, imagine you are the CEO of your own company and are about to hand out merit-based raises to your employees (or grades to your teammates). You have a limited budget for raises, so employees who don’t meet the minimum expectations won’t get a raise.

What minimum expectations would you have for one of your own employees? Would you expect that they show up every day? Would you expect them to be attentive and contribute during meetings? Would you expect them to follow standards? Would you expect them to complete assigned tasks in a timely manner? Would you expect them to be prepared?

Consider your answers to these questions as the minimum level of work that a person would do for the salary they currently make. You likely wouldn’t provide merit-based raises for meeting minimum expectations. It’s not altogether different when we consider evaluating academic performance. In particular, the University of Guelph grading standards indicate that a student meeting minimum expectations would receive a grade of 50% – 59% (or an equivalent grade label of D). Whatever minimum expectations you set for yourself and your team shouldn’t automatically assign a grade of 80% or 90%.

Take a moment to jot down the expectations you would have of your teammates.

Activity: Working as a Team

As a team, review the tips for working on a team, and then discuss – one at a time – the responses of each team member to the questions outlined under Developing A Team Contract. Use these responses to create your draft team contract below. You can also find a copy of this contract here (this is a template, so please simply copy it to your computer).

Activity: Building a Rubric

As a team, review the tips for developing a team rubric, and then discuss – one at a time – the expectations you have for yourself and the members of the team that you’ve listed in Developing A Team Rubric. Use these, along with your team contract to create your draft team rubric. You may also opt to explore examples of rubrics that are readily available online.

To build your rubric, you should identify the things that your team expects and values. These will become the rows of your rubric.

You should also develop a set of evaluation labels (such as unsatisfactory, below average, average, above average, and excellent) on which to judge yourself and the team members. You don’t want too few labels, but you also don’t want too many; three to five labels are probably sufficient.

Now consider the work you would expect yourself or someone else to do to achieve each of those labels. That is, describe what an unsatisfactory performance or above-average performance might look like. How would they differ from average or excellent performances? In the example above, you’ll find short paragraphs describing the differences between each of the evaluation labels.

Next, determine what grade or grade range each label would receive. For example, the University of Guelph indicates that a B is between 70 and 79. You can stick with the University of Guelph example, or you can come up with your own. You can also decide whether or not you even want to use a grade range; you may opt instead to use a point system. The bottom line is that it really doesn’t matter so long as you are consistent and honest with your evaluation.

Once you’ve filled in your rubric, determine if each row contributes the same weight to the final score. Indicate the weight with the description of the row. In our example, attending all meetings & contributed positively to group discussions is worth 10% of the grade. Thus, if you were to evaluate a teammate as average and assigned a score of 65%, then this would translate to 6.5 points out of a total of 10 for that particular row.

Lastly, determine if there are any conditions or exceptions that veto all other considerations. For example, submitting plagiarized work might immediately result in a 0 being assigned, regardless of showing up prepared for all meetings. Document these conditions and exceptions and make them a part of your rubric.

When you have your team rubric completed, have each team member sign it. This now becomes your team contract.

Finally, recognize that a rubric can change for any number of reasons. If you find that you need to modify the rubric, you must first chat with the instructor to approve any changes.