Blog Post Four: Reflection on Team-Based Research Project Proposal

The past seven weeks of working on the research project proposal on the issue of ‘Employment of Ex-Offenders in Singapore’ with my team have been very enriching and enlightening. From the initial stage of selecting the research focus, to the final stages of writing and presenting the proposal, I have learned much from this project about team work and group dynamics. These takeaways would be useful as I move on to doing projects at the work place in future. 

Overall, I believe that our team dynamics was very positive. We ensured that team meetings were arranged such that all team members were present to discuss the project. In the initial meetings, we efficiently narrowed down the topic of research while agreeing to a reasonable division of tasks. Regular personal and online meetings (through collaborative platforms such as ‘Google Drive’ and ‘Dropbox’) were conducted on a weekly basis to share findings and discuss content of the written proposal. The agenda for each meeting was clearly defined in advance and thus our meeting time was utilised effectively.  We also set realistic deadlines so that we could complete our individual tasks on time. Good time management was possibly the greatest strength of our team and the importance of this in a team project was the biggest takeaway for me. With proper time management and planning, any project at the work place could be completed at a comfortable pace, leaving sufficient time for editing and review. 

One of the big challenges for our team was collection of primary data. Liaising with organisations for the interviews, as well as finding a large enough target audience to take our surveys was not easy. 

What might have made the collection of data easier for us is drawing a clearer vision of the purpose of the primary research, and by finding out gaps in information in the secondary research. Areas in the proposal that required backing up by primary evidence could have been more explicitly defined in the initial stages of research. The preparatory work would have enabled us to commence contacting the relevant people for our primary research earlier and to ease the liaising process. 

One thing I thought may not always be practical to achieve at the workplace is the presence of all team members at each meeting due to the difficulty in them having differing commitments and schedules. Some possibilities for conducting more successful meetings at the workplace may be as follows: 

• Setting the meeting agenda in advance and inviting only those who can influence fulfillment of meeting objectives. 
• Sending minutes of every meeting to all team members would ensure that everyone is aware of the progress of the project even if they were did not attend a particular meeting 
• A large team could be divided into smaller teams each with their own team leader. Team leaders could come together and discuss the findings of their teams in regular meetings.