Topical research themes 1 - Mobile Sensing

This course is about mobile computing, but the idea is also train you in working in a team. Teamwork is crucial because working individually you would be unlikely to finish the course project on time, do your homework, prepare exams and sleep around eight hours per day. Teamwork is tricky because the following problems often arise:

• Free riding: when a team member benefits from a common work, without putting effort into the work himself/herself.
• Social loafing: when team members try less hard than they when one or more team members leaves most of the work to the rest of the team.
• Conflicts: often happen because of disagreements on what needs to be done, perception that a team member does not put enough effort into the project, inappropriately divided tasks.
• Demotivation: especially when project goals are set unrealistically high, and when at some point team members see that the goals are unattainable.

Explaining team and project management can easily take a whole semester course, thus, here we list a few basic rules that should help you stay away from the above problems.

• Ensure that your skills and interests are known to your potential project partners. Introduce yourself, and state your skills and interests on the class webpage (more about that during the first lecture).
• Pick a project that you are interested in, but be flexible. If you are picking from the list of the offered project, note that someone else might get it instead. If you are proposing your own topic, note that it might be criticised by the rest, and that your teammates/instructors might have amendments to it.
• Pick teammates not friends. Try to find people whose skills and interests with respect to the project topic match with yours. Their gender, hobbies, music taste are irrelevant.
• Be realistic when you plan your work. Have in mind that things can go wrong. You need to have a backup plan.
• Be realistic about overhead associated with scheduling and meeting. If team members are not available for meetings the work can stall drastically.
• Divide the work according to your skills and interests. Unlike working in a company, you are evaluated not only on what you made, but how much you learnt. To each team member assign tasks that are doable by that person, yet challenging enough for that person to learn something.
• Evaluate your work continuously. There are different ways of doing this, from periodic assessments using forms (see the bottom link), to brief daily recap meetings (see SCRUM). It is very important to evaluate, and distinguish between, both individual and group performance.
• Create roles within a team. This is beyond merely picking a team leader. It’s about picking a person who will, for example, moderate discussions, keep the agenda for the team, someone who will set micro milestones to keep the team on the path, someone who will check if the work quality complies with the set up plan, someone who will explore new solution areas while others are implementing one version, someone who will try to raise constructive counter-arguments agains the proposed solution in order. Of course, multiple roles can be assumed by one person. (see the bottom link for some ideas)
• Spot and discuss problems early on. Be introspective and notice any problems before they become major problems. Openly, but politely, discuss the problems with your team. If the problems grow to the point where you cannot solve it yourselves, contact the instructor immediately.

Useful links:

• Carnegie Mellon Eberly Center guidelines for teamwork. Follow the link to find a number of documents including templates for team evaluation and possible team roles.