Exercise 11.

1 - The following activities are based on a recently completed group project that you have
been involved in. This project may have been a student project, a work project, or an extracurricular
project.

One recently completed group work project on which the whole analysis is based: billing system
implementation for centralized procurement team so as to make the billing system more transparent
and remove the cumbersome task of manual maintenance of vendors bill and information.

a. Analyze the development of the team in terms of the five-phase model and the punctuated
equilibrium model. Which model does the best job of describing how the team evolved?

In punctuated equilibrium model the team approaches its project in its first meeting and most
importantly the team stays within that framework throughout the first half of the life of the team and
hence punctuated equilibrium model suits more when organizations work on a project which is of longer
duration or work on long term goals such as professional teams(teams in the organizations) but on the
other hand for projects where team forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning of team is
required five-phase model of group development is most effective.

In our case five phase model does the best job of team evolvement because as this was a short term
project after which the team has to be dissolved hence for project related work like business
requirement gathering, System development, user acceptance testing etc team formation, team
storming, team Norming, team performing and team adjourning were the most critical and important
aspect so to make them comfortable while working with each other and make successful project
implementation.

b. Analyze the group in terms of the nine situational factors that influence team development. What
factors positively contributed to group performance? What factors negatively contributed to group
performance? How did the group try to overcome the negative factors? What could you have done
differently to overcome these negative factors?

There were many situational factors that affected the team development in both positive and negative
ways and those are being described below:-

Factors that positively contributed to group performance were the team members who were considered
in the project will be serving the project from beginning to end and this helped team formation and
development more efficiently because each one will be fully involved in the project and will help other
team members during the project huddles and planning, members are assigned to the project full time
so that each one can concentrate on their assigned responsibilities, all team members were part of the
organization and no team members were from outside which helped each one to share the organization
trust and cooperation.

The factors which negatively contributed to group performance was that the members of the team were
less than ten and as a result of it different responsibilities has to be given.
The group tried to overcome the negative factors by sharing and learning from each other in spite of
shorter deadlines. In addition to it they also handled the areas of responsibilities where they were not
experienced or skillful enough by learning from other members of outside team or within team.

To overcome this negative factor of less member in the team I would have given training to the
members and at the same time I would have allocated best man for the best task based upon his skills,
experience and learning's.

c. Analyze how effectively the group managed meetings. What did the group do well? What didn’t the
group do well? If the group were formed again, what specific recommendations would you make
about how the group should manage meetings?

The group managed it meetings very effectively and this was done by meeting every morning before the
start of work and meeting every evening after the close of the day's work. Hence it can be said that this
helped the team to communicate better and report all problems related to the project on daily basis.

Lack of coordination with each other at times was the area where the group did not do well.

If the group were formed again then some of the recommendations to manage group meetings will be:-

1.Have group meetings on every alternate day.

2.Give time to team members to highlight their problematic areas during the meetings

3.All team members should be asked to speak and discuss one by one instead of all speaking at one
time.