Preparing Contingency Plans
One of my classes has a group project that will make up half my grade. When my group was created out of default a little over a week ago, I felt pretty good about the match-even though we didn't hear from one of the group members, then had a flurry of emails and contributions to the discussion from her the day of class.
Tuesday night, we came up with three ideas that we wanted to explore for our project, with each of us taking one of them to explore more in depth. I posted the week's punch list (as the manager of the project, it was my role) and member one quickly turned in her part.
The two days later, member two submitted a report-on the same item. Since then, there's been no response to emails, nor a response to the group contract that she needs to add material to before it can be posted.
Last week, there was a little worry that something was wrong. This week, I realize this may just be the way she operates-but it doesn't work well for group projects. The other group member and I chatted tonight for twenty minutes and it's good that we're on the same page.
The project we're looking at doing can easily be scaled for two or three people to do, so we'll bite the bullet if the other person bails on us. It was good to know she was on the same page, that we may need to have a plan B in this situation. As much as she'd already impressed me with the calibre of her work, she just kicked that up several notches with the knowledge that we may be dealing with a group of two.
It could be a stressful situation (on top of the life stresses), but we both are feeling pretty good that we're on top of it. If person two doesn't show up tomorrow night, we're ready to ask our professor to grant us a little favor of seeing the weekly assignment modules early to allow us to map things out now, instead of as each week's assignments are released.
Tuesday night, we came up with three ideas that we wanted to explore for our project, with each of us taking one of them to explore more in depth. I posted the week's punch list (as the manager of the project, it was my role) and member one quickly turned in her part.
The two days later, member two submitted a report-on the same item. Since then, there's been no response to emails, nor a response to the group contract that she needs to add material to before it can be posted.
Last week, there was a little worry that something was wrong. This week, I realize this may just be the way she operates-but it doesn't work well for group projects. The other group member and I chatted tonight for twenty minutes and it's good that we're on the same page.
The project we're looking at doing can easily be scaled for two or three people to do, so we'll bite the bullet if the other person bails on us. It was good to know she was on the same page, that we may need to have a plan B in this situation. As much as she'd already impressed me with the calibre of her work, she just kicked that up several notches with the knowledge that we may be dealing with a group of two.
It could be a stressful situation (on top of the life stresses), but we both are feeling pretty good that we're on top of it. If person two doesn't show up tomorrow night, we're ready to ask our professor to grant us a little favor of seeing the weekly assignment modules early to allow us to map things out now, instead of as each week's assignments are released.
Comments
Another situation is our research methods class. 6 of us in the group and except for the first 2 classes only 3-4 of us are in class on any given week. Our experiment in class will be Oct 10.. I will be interested to see who does show up for that.