Our Journey

Our Journey

Team 5 Span have been on an intense and action-packed journey over the past 12 weeks. The members of the group have reflected on the experience of working within a team of relative strangers, operating under tight time constraints and towards the shared goal of improving the experience of our persona ‘Sonia’ who you will meet in the later chapters of this book.

In order to outline that journey succinctly, we have used Tuckman’s framework of group development. (Tuckman, 1965)

Forming

Our team did not reach its full complement of members until week 3 and by that time the longer standing members had already begun to analyse the design challenge and identify potential areas of focus. The felt need to progress rapidly resulted in the team deprioritising the completion of the team charter beyond simply agreeing on the logistics of how the team would operate in the remote space and how we would commit our time to the process. Our different levels of digital literacy became apparent and added to our challenges forming our team, with some members at ease with working 100% online, while others were still finding their way around digital collaboration tools, or struggling with poor digital infrastructure.

Storming

That initial decision not to focus on the team charter in the early space had some negative repercussions for the team over the subsequent weeks. Team discussions became quite emotionally charged with different team members having different expectations around commitment, communications styles and expectations. It became apparent that the different team members held different values to one-another and these values were often in opposition during the operations of the group leading to conflict.

Norming

In an effort to move forward, we decided to embrace our values as an asset even when they were in opposition with one another. We made the commitment to respect and make space for the values of all team members and be mindful that all of our needs could be met with some compromise and consideration.

Performing

Creating our persona, ‘Sonia’ had a very powerful impact on the working of the group. Having a ‘real person’ to design for afforded a shared purpose and set working for Sonia as our primary focus. The performing stage was also saw the team ‘hitting its stride’ – getting to know each other’s personalities, ways of working and skill sets. This accelerated trust among the group and helped us to share out tasks to the benefit of the whole team. We had a wealth of expertise to draw on in our group particularly from design and digital perspective.
In addition, beginning to gather and appreciate our work and artefacts produced by the group, we were able to engage in more camaraderie, leverage opportunities to meet in person and introduce a social element.

Adjourning

Now, at the end of our design journey, we are reflecting on the group formation process and are grateful for the experiences we had, including the challenging ones. We gained superb learning from the fact that our early challenges did not negatively impact on the ultimate success of the work. The team agree that we would bring a greater focus to the early group formation stage in future, to mitigate emerging ‘stormy’ periods, we also feel more equipped to manage that situation should it emerge. Furthermore, we have learned that it will not necessarily derail the process, rather, it can lead to successful outcomes.