Managing team projects in Entrepreneurship courses
All undergraduate courses in entrepreneurship include team exercises. The main reason is that it is too difficult and time consuming for one person to complete the kind of projects that are needed to a reasonable level of quality. Working in a team allows participants to share the workload and achieve a good level of quality of output and learning.
CDE staff appreciate that some students may have reservations about taking on courses with team projects as they may have had unfortunate experiences with team members who try to 'free load' on the efforts of others.
Each course therefore includes project planning requirements to address this question, and these form part of the assessment for each project.
The team project plan
Each team is required to start working on a project plan in the very first session of the course. They are required to identify times when they can meet to work on their project, as well as during the scheduled workshop sessions.
In a later seminar session, teams are required to start allocating tasks and to determine deadlines.
Students can download a template for this project plan from the course web site (this is in the form of an Excel file). The template for their Study Period includes the deadlines and timetable so that all members of each team will work to the same schedule. This will help to avoid the pitfalls that teams sometimes encounter. You can see an example of a completed project plan. This plan should fit onto one page.
Teams are required to complete their project plan and submit it through AssignIT at three stages in the project:
- early in the project when tasks and deadlines have been assigned to team members
- about 10 days before the deadline for the final report (this is to be an updated plan)
- as the final page of their written report. This is to be a summary of who did what and when.
The three versions of this project plan are assessed as part of the final report and represent 10% of the marks for the team project report.
Note that the project report is assessed as a whole - that is, a grade is given for the report, so that each team member receives the same grade for this assessment (although it is possible to award different grades if necessary).
Records of meetings
We expect that team meetings will take place face-to-face. However, some meetings may use teleconferencing (eg using Skype), on-line chat sessions, or a discussion forum (a team can request the lecturer to set up a restricted access discussion forum, or the team can set up their own blog site for this purpose).
Team members are to take it in turn to write a short record of each team meeting. This is to include the full names of those who attend (and identifying those who arrived late and those who left early), and the outcomes in the form of a list of tasks agreed and responsibilities allocated (ie who will do what and by when). This record is to be emailed to all team members within a day of the meeting.
Note that this means that students will need to check their email accounts and make sure that their mailboxes are not full - otherwise they will not receive these emails. Students will not be able to argue that they did not receive these emails.
The lecturer may require a copy of these email records of meetings, and will use these together with the team's project plans to allocate different grades to different team members if necessary.
This is just good business practice that delivers real benefits
The project plan and record of meetings are good business practice. They do not take up much time and are straightforward to implement. This process will really benefit each team and will help them to be well organised, effective and productive. In addition, this approach will help to reduce stress and will help to make the preparation of the report a positive learning process.