Hello!
Continuing from the last post, here are the other things that went wrong with the BGP project (from my perspective at least). Note that I’ll be using the words ‘workplace’ and ‘office’ interchangeably when referring to the room that was set aside for my group to work on the project in.
Working hours & presence at the workplace
The working hours for the group were initially set, from 9:00 / 10:00 to 17:00 / 18:00 (some flextime was allowed). This would have been all well and good if everyone had kept these working hours. However, as time went by, people started showing up a later hours, usually after 12:00, meaning they had to stay until after 18:00 to get their work done for the day.
This meant that most members of the group didn’t work in the office at the same time. This makes collaboration more difficult. Working in an office that is mostly empty can also be quite stressful, as I realized far to late. You don’t know what the other members are doing and you have no firm grasp on the status of the project overall.
This became even worse when some of the members stopped coming in to work all together and worked from their homes instead. This was tolerated initially as it was believed that more work would be done faster if they were allowed to work at home.
In the end I believe it did more harm than good due to the lack of collaboration that resulted from the lack of presence at the office and the influence this had on the stress factor.
Failure to utilize SCRUM & daily stand-up
The group initially had SCRUM documentation set up as well as a daily stand-up routine, which was only kept during the first few weeks, after that the daily stand-up fell out of practice. This was probably due to the lacking presence of group members in the workplace. That most group members didn’t follow the working hours if they did come to the office made this even worse. The daily stand-up routine did come back into practice somewhat towards the end of the project with some help from the school, and it did help increase production but in the end was not enough, unfortunately.
The SCRUM documentation was hardly ever used after being set up, even at the start of the project.
This might have helped me keep focus on each task if I had stuck with it, but it is hard to say what impact it would have had. Even if I didn’t use the scrum I still documented everything I did as best I could in a diary of sorts as well as using the ‘sticky notes’ application in Windows.
Wrap-up
That is all I can think of. The problems were mostly related to stress and disorganization, not to mention having a team member drop out unexpectedly. What I took away from this was mostly the strong effect of being alone in the workplace had on my stress. Even if some people work better individually, they group as a whole will most likely suffer for it. It also makes it difficult to keep track on everyone through check-ups (or stand-ups) which may lead to additional stress and work being lost if the assets produced are not in concert with each other.
Cheers!