Tuesday, March 18, 2008

The Debate.

During the back and forth debate, on how to deal with the exam and the future exam, I was hearing other people's decision out first before I said anything. According to the slide on "How people handle conflict" I would be under the Collaborating and the Compromise section.

Although I wanted the most from this chance since I performed poorly on the exam, I had to decide on what was fair and right. I wouldn't say I choose to Collaborate and Compromise, it's simply just my personality.

I think there is no other way to have everyone agree on a single decision other than the way our class handled it. Except for a one or two totally self-fish and rude people, it went pretty well. Since 100% agreement is required, everyone had to duke it out so that everyone is on the same page.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Darn Eggs.

First and foremost, our group's egg got smashed. With that said I will evaluate our groups performance.

Step 1. Define your goals and objectives Know where you want to go; understand your deadlines. Be specific enough so that you will know you have arrived when you get there and/or how far off you are along the way.

We as a group had defined the goals and objective. After everyone had imputed their thoughts and ideas we came to a conclusion on the goals and objectives.

Step 2. Determine your resources and current status vis-รก-vis objectives Know where you stand in reaching the objectives from the start; identify resources, group strengths that work in your favor and group weaknesses that can hold you back.

After the group had chose an idea on how to save the egg, we then thought of what and how we were going to use the items given to us. We had chosen the smallest person in the group to drop the egg to decrease the height at which the egg would fall from. The only weakness we had as a group in my opinion was a lack of creative ideas on how to save the egg. I guess that was a weakness in every other group that cracked their egg.

Step 3. Develop several alternative strategies. Generate alternative scenarios for what may happen; identify for each scenario things that may help or hinder progress toward your objectives. Evaluate alternatives to assess strengths and weaknesses of each.

Our group had spent the majority time on this step. We took in all the possibilities of what will happen or what will not happen. All the "ifs" or "maybes" were taken into consideration. That is how the group came to choose one of the ideas.

Step 4. Make a tactical plan Choose the action alternative most likely to accomplish your objectives; describe what specifically must be done to implement this course of action; allocate jobs/roles throughout the team.

The group did not emphasize on this step. When we were given the materials, people just stated what one will do. No action was specifically assigned. If we would have assigned specific roles the goal could have been met faster and more effectively.

Step 5. Implement the plan and evaluate results. Take the planned action; measure progress toward objectives as implementation proceeds; take corrective actions and revise plan as needed.

This step was occuring throughout the project. Even if we set a certain way to reach the goal, we made minor changes along the way because of miscalculations. I would say this was one of the steps our group did well on.