3 Steps to Achieve Effective Collaboration within a Multitasking Team
Teamwork has become one of the most important skills in the recent job market. There are many benefits of working in teams, such as efficiency and diversity. People within a team share a common vision and will support each other to bring valuable deliverables. For my practicum project at the Master of Science in Business Analytics program, I am also working in a team with four other students to bring analytical solutions to our client, BlueMatrix. While working on the same project, we have decided to break down the tasks and work on them parallelly in smaller groups to increase efficiency and bring more incremental deliverables.
Two weeks into the process, we started realizing that people working on different tasks had less chance to communicate and we were not familiar with what was going on in other teams anymore. Did the process make our team more divided? Is there a way to still achieve effective collaboration within a multitasking team? We have decided to make some changes. Below, I will list the three steps we took to save our team from losing the essence of teamwork. Tasks can be divided, but teams will be united.
1. Project Management System
It is important to have a clear project management system that is accessible and visible to everyone. It helps to not only set clear responsibilities within the team but also track all of the tasks that each person is working on. Thus, each sub-group has the autonomy to manage their own tasks, but everyone knows the progress of the project as a team. My team decided to use a Kanban Board in Trello to categorize all tasks into Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Review, and Done. As mentioned in the article “What is a Kanban Board?”, this framework is a part of the Agile frameworks designed to boost team collaboration. In addition, the functions in Trello also allows us to assign members to be responsible for each task and label the tasks under larger components of our overall project.
2. Team Working Sessions
In the article “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams” by Harvard Business Review, “supporting a sense of community” and “informal networks” are important to a team’s success. Teams work more effectively when members are more familiar and comfortable with each other. However, as mentioned earlier, it seems like members in multitasking teams tend to pay much more attention to their own tasks and are less likely to communicate with others. Thus, to enhance the collaborative culture within our team and improve communication between all members, we decided to set up a weekly team working session. During the sessions, all members log in to the same Zoom meeting room and work on our tasks together.
We later found out that these sessions also encouraged the exchange of ideas, so we were able to provide more support to one another. For example, I found a good package to use to complete my task, and I was able to recommend it to another team member who had to achieve a similar goal during one of the working sessions.
3. Peer Review Sessions
The last step we took was to conduct peer review sessions during our weekly meetings before we present our progress to our client. It seems like we have encountered teamwork issues by dividing up the tasks, but we have also realized a good thing about — we were able to check and criticize each other’s deliverables before we bring them to our client. As a team of data analysts, we needed to make sure that we were telling the right story with the data. In Bill Franks’ book 97 Things About Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know, he mentioned four principles to be an ethical data storyteller, and two of the principles are:
1. Ensure the veracity of your insights
2. Check your bias and watch for logical fallacies
Because we have three sub-groups within our team, we were able to help to prevent the other sub-groups from violating the above principles by asking questions and offering alternative perspectives during the peer review sessions. Through these sessions, we have not only been working more collaboratively, but we have also been effectively pushing towards better results.
Most of the teams in the workplace often carry more than one task at the same time. The more diverse the tasks are, the more effort might be required to ensure effective collaboration within the team. My team has found the three steps mentioned above extremely useful to us, thus we were able to achieve efficiency and high-quality work at the same time. Recognizing problems and adjust accordingly is also an important skill in teamwork. I am thankful to my team members for going through this process and being supportive of each other, and I wish these steps can be helpful for you in your teamwork experiences as well.
References
https://productivityland.com/what-is-kanban-board/
“Chapter 42.” 97 Things about Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts, by Bill Franks, O’Reilly, 2020.
