If you’ve read the about blog page, you know that this blog was inspired from a recent class project! Our 5 team members, Josh, Ese, Alessia, Citlali and Sam, saw the link between organization and sustainability and wanted to share our insights and tips to help other student groups promote sustainable practices within their own executive members!

While the rest of the blog consists of tips on how to be organized, we thought it would also be useful for us to share some more insights about how to work in a team and how five friends can stay friends after a group project!

Efficient Allocation and Use of Resources: Faced with a limited timeframe, a group of 5 people with different academic, professional and cultural backgrounds, we had to learn how to efficiently use our time, skills and know-how and allocate tasks amongst ourselves. Through the actual project work, we learnt the importance of organization and being able to organize resources such that it does not generate waste and allows for efficiency. Organization was truly at the core of our whole project! At the beginning of our project, we sat down and had an open conversation about our strengths and weaknesses. This was essential to the success of our project and helped with our final deliverable. 

Communication: One of the most crucial skills we had to develop as a group were communication skills – both internally and externally. Being people from different backgrounds, we needed to find common ground and ways of communicating smoothly and between ourselves in a way that clearly and effectively translated the message especially in times of tension and pressure. Even more importantly, we needed to learn how to communicate with our client and other important stakeholders as well as develop great written communication skills for our reports, emails and similar deliverables. One of the tactics we used was assigning a designated communications person within the team, using a mix of email and in person communication with the client, Facebook group for internal communications and Google Docs for joint work products. Technology truly has changed how we communicate! 

Collaboration: Along the way, we learnt how to work with other people – separately on assigned tasks as well as in conjunction with others towards the attainment of joint goals such as on reports, monitoring exercises. For these, we used scheduling and created small groups within the team for assigned tasks. Collaborating and Communication with each other was essential. We strived to communicate effectively and collaborate with each other respectively. With these goals in mind, we were able to not focus on small issues but remember the bigger picture. 

Research: This was a great exercise in real-life research through which our team was able to use combined research methods – primary and secondary. We came up with our own monitoring and assessment tools and schedule for on-site evaluations of our project space, carried out interviews and surveys with tools we developed and conducted research on relevant policy ideas and interventions useful to our case. We learnt to define problems, conduct research, analyze, design and deploy tools appropriate to our context. 

All in all, it was a worthwhile experience providing us with useful professional skills. And true story, we are all still friends !