Three Success Tips for Group Projects
Group projects are notorious for being a negative experience that most business students face at some point in their education. When done correctly, a group project can emulate a professional environment, alleviate stress on students, and allow for a better work product. However, when done incorrectly, group projects can be the most stressful experience a student can have before they graduate. Today, I am going to share three tips on how to succeed and make the most out of group projects.
Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses
It is important that you identify your own strengths and weaknesses as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your teammates. By doing so, you will be able to better divide work based off tasks that everyone is better at instead of just picking randomly. This can also play a huge role in motivating the less involved group members. People tend to be more interested in doing something they are good at then something they don't know much about, so by taking the time to assign tasks based off of proven skills, you can improve motivation which will lead to improvements in other areas such as timely completion of deliverables.
Play a Role
In some way, every group project will have a set of tasks and roles to help allocate and deliver on those tasks. For example, every project needs a leader, someone to organize everyone, direct attention and communicate updates. Not everyone is comfortable in this leader role, and I have seen groups where no one takes on the leader position and everyone just sits back and waits for everything to happen magically. While that situation is certainly bad, another common scenario occurs where two or more people want to take on the leader position. For those groups, there ends up being no unified direction and time is often wasted by the people trying to take charge from one another. What these two scenarios have in common is that the team members are not adequately filling the necessary roles. Rules on a project can change depending on the assignment, and the best students (and working professionals) are able to identify a role that they can succeed in as well as step into another role when the group demands it. Here's some examples of the roles that you might encounter:
Leader/project manager (good at organization and communication)
The talker or presenter (good at presenting and comfortable in front of a crowd)
The designer (good at creating PowerPoint slides or other visual art)
The writer (good at written communication and report writing)
The analyst (has strong quantitative skills and can tackle more technical areas)
The researcher (is efficient at finding and extracting information from external source material)
As you develop your skills as a student and as a professional, you will learn more about each of these roles and hopefully become better at all of them through experience. However, students at all levels will be able to identify themselves as stronger in a select few roles. With this in mind, here's what you should do to succeed on your next project:
Identify the tasks and the roles required for the assignment, then
Assign each group member a role and the associated tasks while
Prioritizing the experience and preferences of every group member
By taking this approach, you can organize the group in a way that gets the project done (without everyone trying to take charge from one another) while catering to the preferences of the group members.
Work Collectively (One Project, One Voice)
The number one thing that sticks out when inexperienced students do group projects is that they tend to divide up work on a report or presentation and never go through the effort to make it cohesive. in my years as a student and a teacher I can't tell you how many times I've seen reports and presentations from groups that look like they were written by four completely different people independently instead of as a group.
To fix this, the group should pick the best writer or the best presentation creator and have them work with everyone when their sections are done to make the whole project sound like it's coming from one you didn't instead of multiple unmotivated college students. This may take some extra effort and will require people to have their areas complete in advance, but it is well worth the improvement to the final product.
Ultimately, communication and accountability from all group members are the basis for a successful group project. By incorporating these three tips, I hope that you can put your group in a position to communicate more effectively and hold one another accountable based off the roles that everyone decides to take on. Good luck!