Project Management Reflection Essay

Using an academic framework such as Werner, J.M. and Lester, S. W. 2001 Applying a team effectiveness framework to the performance of student case teams. Human Resource Development Quarterly 12 (4) pp 385-402 reflect on how you and your team members performed. In your reflection you should consider; your personal views and assumptions about working in teams, any lessons you learned about working in teams and how you could work more effectively in teams in the future.

I believe that teamwork is the coordinated effort of a group of individuals who work together to achieve success in their endeavour. People from different backgrounds come together to work on a single task with an equivalent contribution to complete it on time. This essay reflects my experience as a team member in carrying out a project as part of my curriculum.

Nowadays, teams are omnipresent. Management students like me obtain firsthand experience of teamwork through group assessments that involve the combined contribution of two or more students. Experts have proven that project success depends on teamwork quality (Müller & Jugdev, 2012). This is determined by team performance such as being an efficient and effective and individual success in satisfaction and learning. The outcome of my team's activity depended on how efficiently we worked to arrive at a quality output to obtain high grade and good feedback from the tutor.

In order to ensure effectiveness, teams have to perform both task work and teamwork (Salas, Thaye, Bedwell, & Lazzara, 2014). The task work of a team comprises of activities that the member have to complete to reach the set targets. Whereas, teamwork focuses on a member's behaviour, his/her beliefs and thinking about working collaboratively to accomplish the task work. As part of the project management course assessment, I was part of a team that has to develop a project management plan. The task work required teamwork to complete the task, as the project plan is sectioned and assigned to each team member. The effectiveness of teamwork and task work is interdependent.  While working in a team, I observed that the value of our activity improves with the value that we give to our team effort.

The core and critical considerations required for an effective team are cooperation, conflict management, coordination, communication management, coaching by leader and cognition through mutual understanding (Kozlowski & Bell, 2013). Other considerations are the composition of the team, situational context and individual's culture. As my team had individuals from different demographic backgrounds, we underwent conflicts, communication gap, lack of information sharing, misunderstandings and lack of direction. To make our effort effective, we planned to conduct scheduled meetings during which we agreed upon who has to lead the team. The task is broken into subtasks, and each one is assigned the respective subtasks. As the subtasks are interdependent, we felt the need for proper communication and scheduled daily meetings to share information gathered, experiences and expertise and update on the progress. Frequent communication resulted in the reduction of misunderstandings and resolved conflicts. Having our tutors as a facilitator helped us to direct the team in the correct course if we swayed off during the progress. Following these steps led to individual engagement to the team resulting in mutual understanding and knowledge sharing.