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This is the first in a series of posts about learning and working effectively as a member of an MBA class project team. In the gradute business programs at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, group project work is fundamental. This started with some feedback I provided to Professor Terri Griffith who quoted me in a blog entry of hers recently.

Roles

The effective teams I’ve been on have had the following well-defined roles:

Team leader: Responsible for making sure work is fairly divided, meetings happen, members are aware of what’s expected of them, and any executive decisions that need to be made. Of course it’s still great when decisions are made by consensus. I’ve seen the team leader role can handed off during the quarter, either by plan or because the current leader is overwhelmed — both times it was effective.

Document editor (one per major document): This person is responsible for assembling everybody’s work and for high and low-level consistency of the document. This person needs to be very quick on communication and editing near the document due date. In a time crunch, this person has authority to make editing decisions or rewrite someone else’s work.

Schedule

Most projects I’ve been on go through the following stages:

1. Defining who’s in and out of the team.
2. Reading the project material and thinking about the key problems.
3. Writing phase I: Splitting up and working on research or background writing tasks (for example, analyze the competition).
4. Debate and agree on the project’s main conclusions
5. Writing phase II: Write the supporting text and conclusions (for example, describe the recommended marketing mix).
6. Final editing

This has worked well enough so far, but I wonder if there are major alternatives to this two-phase approach. This structure doesn’t guarantee equity of intellectual contribution, but the writing assignments in Phase I and Phase II can be assigned in a way that adds to an overall balance.

Challenges

If a participant has particularly poor writing skills, this isn’t noticed until the end of step 3. The work of improving the writing falls on the document editor by default, and the group doesn’t have an obvious way to allow this person to “redeem” his or herself by taking on a helpful role with less writing responsibility. With the project schedule described in this article, the only way a poor writer can avoid causing a big problem would be to self-identify himself or herself and ask to be paired up with somebody else for writing assignments.

Possible improvements

Professor Griffith recommends that the group get to know each other early over coffee or a beer. That sounds great but with everyone busy, this needs to be scheduled right away! Her post also suggests some alternate facilitator roles, but I’m not sure if a typical project team (4-6 people working over a 10 week quarter) allows for this.

I would really like to identify an alternative schedule to what I described above (which probably has different key roles), so that my next team can explicitly choose methodology A or methodology B based on the project requirements and team members’ interests.

So, I would like to hear more suggestions and I hope to follow up with alternative structures.

Look for another post on tools and technologies.

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