How to Collaborate as a Team

This section covers how to work effectively with others on technical projects, including tools, workflows, and communication practices for successful team collaboration.

Learning outcomes:

Describe tools and workflows commonly used for team collaboration on technical projects
Explain strategies for communicating effectively within a team including task delegation and handling disagreement
Apply a collaborative workflow to a group project and evaluate its effectiveness

Key Takeaways:

Most team failures come from unclear expectations, not incompetence; define who does what before work begins
Assign specific tasks to specific people with specific deadlines; "we'll all work on it" usually means no one does it
Address problems early; a conflict that feels awkward to raise at week two becomes a crisis at week six
Use visible tracking tools so everyone knows what is done, in progress, and blocked without having to ask
Professional team workflows like Scrum exist to solve exactly the same problems that student group projects run into

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Why Team Projects Fail
- No clear division of responsibilities
- Team members assume someone else is doing the work
- Poor communication
- Work starts too late
- One person does most of the work
- Conflicts are ignored until the deadline approaches
- No system for tracking progress
- The Secrets of Great Teamwork (Harvard Business Review). Research on what consistently distinguishes high-performing teams from struggling ones
Step 1: Define the Project
- Discuss:
  - What does success look like?
  - What are the required deliverables?
  - What are the grading criteria?
  - What are the major milestones?
- Create a shared project summary that includes everything spelled out including communication methods, project summary with deadlines and anything else that the team thinks is important to bring up
Step 2: Establish Team Expectations
- Communication
  - How will we communicate?
  - How quickly should messages be answered?
  - What happens if someone is unavailable?
- Meetings
  - How often will we meet?
  - In person or online?
  - Who schedules meetings?
- Accountability
  - What happens if a deadline is missed?
  - How will concerns be raised?
  - How will work be reviewed before submission?
Step 3: Break Work Into Tasks
- Avoid agreeing to vague responsibilities
- Tasks should be:
  - Specific
  - Measurable
  - Assigned to specific people
  - Time-bound
Step 4: Create Internal Deadlines
- Never use the final due date as the first deadline
- Internal deadlines create room for revisions and unexpected problems
- Plan for issues and roadblocks
- Make sure to take into account everyone's schedule and availability
  - For example, if you have things due in 3 classes on one day that might not be a good day to have more things due
Step 5: Track Progress
- Teams should always know:
  - What is complete
  - What is in progress
  - What still needs to be done
  - Who is working on what
- Tool Ideas/Suggestions:
  - Trello
  - GitHub Projects
  - Microsoft Planner
  - Sticky notes
  - Whiteboard, or try Excalidraw for a free online option (no account required)
Step 6: Address Problems Early
- Most team conflicts become difficult because nobody addresses them
- Clear and straightforward communication is important
- Remember everyone wants to do well and thinks they are a good person; conflicts can come from misunderstandings and communication issues
- Focus on:
  - Actions
  - Expectations
  - Solutions
- Avoid:
  - Personal attacks
  - Assumptions
  - Public confrontation
- Google re:Work: Understanding Team Effectiveness. Google's research on what actually makes teams succeed, with psychological safety as the most important factor
Example: Research Presentation Team
- Assignment: Create a 15-minute presentation on renewable energy policy
- Team: 4 students
- Things to do:
  - Topic selection
  - Research
  - Content development
  - Slide creation
  - Presentation preparation
Example – Research Phase
- Research Phase: Each student finds 2–3 credible sources and does some research on the topic independently
- As a group discuss:
  - Evaluate source quality
  - Compare findings
  - Identify common themes
  - Decide which information to include
Example – Start the project
- Content Development:
  - Create presentation outline together
  - Determine and list key points
  - Decide who will explain each section
- Slide development could be done together or independently for each section
Example – Practice and Revision
- Review visual design, slides and citations
- Suggest improvements and practice
- Practice presentation
- Time each section
- Identify unclear explanations
- Revise if needed!
Example – Check-ins and what's a success
- Check-In 1
  - Are the sources credible and relevant?
- Check-In 2
  - Does the presentation address all assignment requirements?
- Check-In 3
  - Can every team member explain the project and answer questions?
- Success Factors
  - Shared understanding of the topic
  - Regular meetings
  - Collective review of all materials
  - Everyone participates throughout the project
How Scrum works in industry as a popular framework
- The Official Scrum Guide

Suggested Activities and Discussion Topics:

Activity: Go through This AI generated study guide, what do you think? Did it capture the week materials well? How did you do on the self quiz? Do you know all the vocab used?
Activity: Go through this AI-generated key terms list for this module. How many of the terms did you already know? Were there any definitions you would update or expand based on the lecture notes? Did the AI miss any important terms? This should take about 10–15 minutes.
Activity: In a small group, take a real or made-up project (such as planning an event, building a small app, or creating a study guide for a class) and assign each person a role such as project lead, note-taker, or task tracker. Use a free tool like Trello, a shared Google Doc, or even a hand-drawn Kanban board to organize your tasks. At the end of the session, each person should reflect on the following: Was it clear who was responsible for what? Did the tool help or get in the way? What would you change about how the group communicated or divided the work? This should take about 45–60 minutes.
Activity: Think of a team project you have been part of in school, at work, or elsewhere, that did not go smoothly. Write a short retrospective that covers: What was the goal? What went wrong with communication or task division? What would you do differently now using the strategies from this module? Then share with a partner and discuss whether your solutions are similar or different. This should take about 30–45 minutes.
Discussion: What makes someone a good teammate versus a difficult one? Think about your own experiences working in groups and identify two specific behaviors that helped a team succeed and two that caused friction. How much of successful collaboration is about tools and process versus the attitudes and habits of the people involved?
Discussion: In professional settings, teams often include people working across different time zones, schedules, and communication styles, and increasingly remote collaboration is the norm. What challenges does this create that don't exist when a team is in the same room? What tools or habits have you seen or used that help bridge that gap, and what do you think still gets lost even with the best tools? What is a tool that is common in another culture besides your own?
Activity: Choose an AI tool of your choice such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. Ask it to list five common causes of team dysfunction in a technical or academic group project setting and suggest one concrete strategy for addressing each. Read through the list and evaluate it: Are these causes realistic based on your own group project experiences? Are the suggested strategies actually practical or just generic advice? Which one would you actually try? What did the AI miss? This should take about 5–10 minutes.
Activity: Create a team charter for a real or hypothetical group project. A team charter is a short written agreement covering how the team will work together: communication methods, meeting schedule, decision-making process, and what happens if expectations are not met. Using the framework from this module, write a charter for a four-person project. Include at minimum: the project goal, communication channel and expected response time, meeting frequency, task assignment process, and what steps the team will take if someone misses a deadline. Then reflect: Would having this at the start of a group project actually help? What would you want to add? This should take about 30–45 minutes.
Activity: Try a structured standup meeting format with a group of classmates or coworkers. A standup is a short 10–15 minute check-in where each person answers three questions: What did I work on since we last met? What am I working on next? Is there anything blocking my progress? Run at least two standup sessions for a real project or simulate them for a class assignment. Evaluate: Did the format help people understand what each person was doing? Did it surface any problems early? Was the time limit enough? This format is widely used in tech industry teams. This should take about 30–45 minutes; run at least two sessions.
Activity: Read enough of the Official Scrum Guide to understand the core roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team), events (Sprint, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Retrospective), and artifacts (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog). Then answer the following: Which parts of Scrum map directly to the strategies in this module? Which parts would be difficult to apply in an academic group project and why? What would you borrow from Scrum even if you are not following the full framework? This should take about 30–45 minutes.
Activity: Reconstruct a real team failure. Think of a group project you were part of that did not go well, or find a publicly documented example such as a company blog postmortem of a failed product launch. Using the "Why Team Projects Fail" list from this module, identify which specific failure modes were present: unclear responsibilities, poor communication, starting too late, or others. Then describe what would have had to change at the beginning to prevent those failures. Be specific about at least two turning points. This should take about 30–45 minutes.
Activity: Practice giving constructive feedback on team work. Find a piece of work produced by a group, such as a classmate's project, a public open source repository, or a sample deliverable from another course. Write a structured review that includes: two specific things that work well and why, two specific suggestions for improvement with enough detail to act on, and one question you would ask the team to understand their decisions better. Use the communication principles from this module: focus on actions and work rather than people, and keep the tone solution-oriented. This should take about 30–45 minutes.

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