Re: "An Eggs-cellent Way to Plan"

My team accomplished Step 1: Define the goals and objective of planning. Since Professor Kurpis gave us the instructions during the beginning of the class, we knew that our goal or objective is to achieve 5 point extra credit, by building a protection device to protect the egg from breaking within 30 minutes of planning period, and 10 minutes of operating. We did not go into details in Step 2-Determine resources and current status vis-á-vis objectives, because we were given supplies from Professor Kurpis, therefore we didn't need to identify them and we also did not define any group strength or weakness as we go along. In a way, we kind of bypass step 2 of the process because we didn't think defining group's strength or weakness is an important step in the process. As for steps 3 and 4, many of us have developed many alternative designs for the contraption in case the first one does not work out. Though, we were not able to try the alternatives, because the first one seem to be the one that we all agreed on, and plus there was time limitation. We did not exactly made clear on whose role is what, because we were all concentrating on putting everything together on time. One member decided to draw out the layout, others helped getting supplies, tearing tape into pieces, and luckily for us one of team member had a small scissor so we made it through and used our time very handily. For the final step we all decided to have the shortest person in the team to carry out the action, because the close we are to the ground the greater chance that our egg won’t break. In the end, our egg did not break and we evaluated that as a successful planning.

I don’t think my team needs any particular improvement. The design worked out well and we all participated in the planning process, although some of us don’t do as much as others. I think the only thing that could be done to enhance our performance is to assign roles to everyone in the beginning of the process, because some of us were just confused and don’t know who is doing what. Overall, I think we did a good job and everyone had fun and we all made an effort to earn the credit.

Dealing with Management?

My Biggest Management Problem…

I think right now I have a hell of hard time managing to work with others, specifically the group members that my professors assigned. I hate doing group works because you can never be assigned to the responsible group members. I tried to contact everybody so we can get start on these dreadful and overwhelming projects, but nobody seems to cooperate with me. Either they have no response or no time. I know everybody has their own things going on but this is still a part of our grades, and I don’t want to risk my grades with their irresponsibility.

The worst part of it is that the professors don’t care, all they ever say is that this is how it would be like working for big companies; random assigned groups and you have to work everything out yourself, and then they throw you a big deadline regardless how things might go wrong. If this is how big companies are like I rather not choose to go into that path. I put a lot of effort in my works, why should my performance be judged by other people’s failure. College or companies should not evaluate students or employees based on ability to work in groups. I tried, and as much as I wanted to I cannot manage to deal with people that don’t care.