There are many ways to evaluate a good planning process, but what do eggs have to do with planning, and does a broken egg signify bad planning?
Well, if the plan was to prevent the egg from breaking - then the answer is a obviously YES!
Our group was given the task to design and build some sort of contraption for an egg, and then release it from approximately 10 feet high. The objection was to prevent the egg from breaking. All this sounds too easy, but when you are introduced to a totally new team and the team has only 30 minutes to complete the task, the word "easy" breaks along with the egg.
In spite of the constraints mentioned, our team worked pretty well in getting this done; we had some arguments (AKA brainstorming) in the beginning about what is the best contraption to design, but at the end we somewhat combined all our ideas to create the best contraption ever made. Or so we thought.... The contraption didn't work and our planned failed. The question is why did it fail and how can we improve?
Our team didn't go through the planning process as listed, but it is very natural to go through most, if not all of the steps without even thinking about it. You cannot have a good plan if you bypass any one of the steps. For example, you will not be able to do anything without knowing your objective first, and you will not be able to succeed in the future if you do not evaluate your results at the end.
Our group was pretty well organized, but it is pretty hard to work in a team where you do not know one another, and you do not know which one of the members you can trust; if you work with a team that you have worked with in the past, and you know the members, then you feel more comfortable with other members' ideas. That said, even in a new team like this, it was very easy to differentiate between those who knew and cared about what will happen, and those who didn't and only created panic.
As a conclusion, our planning process was good and if we will work in the future in the same team, things will be much easier and more successful. Regarding the egg process, a different plan would have probably worked out better, but the most important thing is to learn from past results and improve for future planning.
Knowing your team members before you have to complete a challenge is definitely beneficial, as you mentioned. It allows you to skip over some steps in the planning process that you cannot skip over if no one knows each other. For instance, no longer do you have to worry about figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of each member to better your team performance, since knowing everyone eliminates the need to do that. Still, with this task, working with a brand new team did not really put any team at an extreme disadvantage so much so that the teams couldn't complete the task, which shows that success was reached to some extent - We were able to familiarize ourselves with new colleagues enough so that the task could be completed. Unfortunately, the actual goal of the task was not accomplished. But, like you said, failed results only pave way for improvement.
ReplyDeleteWe did a similar process as your in brainsorming ideas of our own then at the end we combined it to make the best our of it. But once we got the egg whatever we planned/ imagined to proceed in wrapping the straws around the egg, it kept slipping out of its little nest. And it was frustrating with the time ticking. But at the end where we have to drop the egg, the balance of the hand and the egg was really not something that we can control much with distance that high from the ground. Most group's eggs, like ours, committed suicide. But this experiment definitly gave us some thinking to do for improvemnets in the future if we'll ever encounter such situation again. Well, maybe not the egg. Lol. =]
ReplyDeleteI liked the way you called the arguments in the beginning brainstorming lol. Combining ideas is not bad but maybe you should have paid attention to the "what ifs" more. That is nice that you had good team members, and you wish to stick to them. I had to change mines at the beginning of this class because my first group was not creative at all.
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