Self-Assessment of Strengths and Weaknesses

Overall observation

After participating to the residential workshop, we have learnt a few management knowledge and skills throughout the engineering management practice. These knowledge and skills are useful for our future life as they are training up our confidence and attitude. Other than the knowledge and skills for individual, for the whole team operation, cooperation and communication of each of us were trained in the workshop as well. We needed to suggest, discuss and improve the solutions for each activity. For each activity, we needed to make the decision and complete the task in a limited time. We needed to do the job allocation and organization ourselves. In addition, there were two aspects we had newly learnt in the workshop. They were to read the instruction carefully and respect the rules. These two skills really need in the workplace. Finally, the most important is the workshop provides a chance for us to know each of our teammates.

Overall group performance analysis

After playing all activities through the residential workshop, we found that our team did not have a real leader. To manage our team, we tried to choose different leader in different task. Although we had many discussions, we were still unfamiliar with each other because the workshop was just two days long. Since each of us had different abilities and different tasks needed to be solved by different abilities, we tried to select the most suitable members to be the leader of different tasks. This method helped us to handle the challenges.

Illustration
For playing each activity, firstly, we discussed the instruction and a “volunteer” suggested his or her own ideas and these ideas would be approved by others. If the idea got approval, the “volunteer” would be the leader of that game. Otherwise, the other members would suggest another better idea and did the same approach. If there were two ideas come out, we used the voting method to decide that which idea would be implemented. Finally, the “leader” will lead us to complete the tasks.

Since all our teammates were cooperative and had trust in each other, we all put the greatest effort in each game. By doing our best, we kept our performance in a high standard which was showed in the result of each game, rank between 1 and 3. This average ranking won us the champion in this workshop.
Recommendation for improvement

Though our team won the championship in the workshop, there still is room for us to improve our team performance in the coming projects. There were some weaknesses of our team during the activities: ▪ Brainstorming ▪ Inconsiderate the instruction ▪ Absence of leader

Brainstorming

Brainstorming was ineffective in our team as all our teammates were lacking ideas and experiences.

We should separate brainstorming into two sections, a few minutes for individual and group. For individual brainstorming, it would not be affected by other’s opinions. It has more freely creative. In addition, when individual members reach our limit on an idea, another member's creativity and suggestions can bring the ideas to next stage. Therefore, group brainstorming would become more effective and tend to develop the ideas deeper than that of individual brainstorming.

Inconsiderate the instruction

We often read the instruction in careless way. This problem caused us to spend much time on considering something unimportant and spend little time on some essential issues.

To improve our performance, we should read the instruction carefully and lay out any criteria should be met. And, we should make enquiry if we feel confused with the instruction.

Absence of leader

In our team, we did not have an obvious coordinator and supervisor to manage our group performance. A leader would be helpful to our team to improve our time management and working efficiency.