根据月刊中显示,一个普遍性和一个具有反射性的概念并不存在。所以在本文我们是主要关注我们所做项目的个人思考性行为以及对于人类活动的反思。人们可以根据他们的经验在仔细考虑过后,进行评估(Boud et al .,1985),他们可以让人去学习他们的经验以及对于好的东西表示肯定。在这个反射性行为中,我最为感兴趣的三个方面是:项目管理、团队领导和团队合作。
根据项目管理协会,该项目可描述为“开展创建独特的产品或一个临时性的服务所进行的努力。”它有五个阶段的项目管理,分别为:定义、计划、组织、控制、和完成(Weiss和威索基,1992)。在这个咨询项目中,我们的主要工作是为我们的客户(KMS软件)做市场营销计划。这个项目对客户向建筑行业推出他们的新产品非常重要。因此,所有组成员了解我们的宗旨和目标。我们的团队在计划阶段做得很出色,因为我们写了项目建议为这个项目画了线条图,以至于我们清楚的知道我们需要做的。我们只需要在下次会议前完成我们的个人计划书,我们也可以一次性完成这个项目。项目管理不仅可以帮助我们节省我们的时间,使我们可以更好的控制,它也可以提高我们的市场营销计划的质量和实用性。
According to Moon (1999), a common and agreed upon concept of reflection does not exist, so this paper mainly focus on the individual reflection about what we had done in the project, and reflection is an important human activity, in which people recapture their experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate(Boud et al.,1985), and they also states reflection in the context of learning can make people to explore their experiences in order to lead to new understanding and appreciations. In this reflection paper I am interested in three areas: project management , team leadership and teamwork. The project management can help us to do the marketing plan more efficiency, and at the same time it can make sure the plan is in right process and finished on time; The team leadership can motivate the team member to achieve the goal,in other words, leader’s personal behaviour can impact other group members performances when they do project potentially, and meanwhile it can make the group member works as a team(cohesion) to improve the efficiency, it seems has the same faction as project management; for teamwork, through the Belbin’s team role model we know each group member’s role, so we can separated individual work reasonable, and each of us can finish the job easily.
According to the Project Management Institute(2004), the project can be describe as “ a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.” There are five phases in the project management, they are, define, plan, organize, control, and close(Weiss and Wysocki, 1992). In this consultancy project, our mainly work is to do a marketing plan for our client (KMS software),and this plan is important for the client to launch their new product to the construction industry, so aims and objec all group member know our tives, and our group done a very well in the plan phase, because we wrote a proposal and made a Gantt charts for this project , so we all clearly know what we need to do, we just need finish our individual works before next meeting, so we can finish this project step by step. The project management not only can help us to save our time and make everything in our control , but it also can improve our marketing plan ‘s quality and practicability.#p#分页标题#e#
There was a problem come out in the organize phase, and I have a strong impression on this, in the primary research, there was a hard challenge for us : telephone interview. Because our marketing plan is about to sell the product to the SME construction company, in other words , it is business to business, so we cannot do questionnaire in the NBS or on the street, and this interview is very important for our marketing plan, because we have to know what the customer’s information, if we failed to do this survey, our marketing plan is half-baked, and it is not enough to be convincing. Before we done it, we need to collection the construction firm’s information, such as the company name, the location, the telephone number, and what these firms manufacture and so on. One of group member and I be in charge of this part of work, we found about 200 companies from Fame with the turnover from 1 million pounds to 15 million pounds. We chosen 20 firms from this company list to do the telephone interview , in addition, we also checked these company’s information on its website to make sure it is correct, then we thought it is enough , because our requirement is to interview 10 companies. In fact, after the other group member done the telephone interview, there were only two companies involved in this interview, the success rate is one-tenth, and the problem is that some companies thought it is not necessary for their business, because they are small size firm, and some company did not like the telephone interview, because they thought this is waste their time. When I heard of this news, I thought we failed on telephone interview, and I also thought maybe we should give up the telephone interview, because one of my friends’ group failed on the telephone interview before. If we failed on this interview, we cannot do the plan in the next step, because we need to know the company’s information, then we can do the marketing mix, especially the promotion part, so we decided to call the target company as many as we can until we get 10 interviewee, in addition, we try to make the interview between 5 to 10 minutes. In the end, we done this telephone interview, we contacted about 100 companies and taken about 7 hours to collected ten company’s information.
This is our first time to do the telephone interview, and this part of work must be done on time because the project management, actually I have done questionnaire and interview before, but that is just a research practice and the survey target is my classmate, so it is very easy to do, and this time we unexpected that the telephone interview is so hard. Though this problem, my colleagues taught me a lot of something that I cannot learned from books, and one of the most important point is do not say give up easily, because if people insist on one thing; they will come to the top at the end, and I think this will help me to overcome many hard situations in my career and life.#p#分页标题#e#
According to Weth (2005), the definition of the leadership is: the accomplishment of a goal through the direction of human assistants. As I said before, individual behavior can affect other group member’s performance potentially, although there are many factors can affect team success, the influence of team leader is especially important, so a good leader is necessary for a team if they want to achieve success. According to Trent (2004), the team leader can stimulate group interaction, discourage member complacency, provide a source of enthusiasm for team tasks, and see to it that team responsibilities are important, challenging, recognized , and rewarded. He also states that only a formal leader can perform many of the responsibilities associated with team leadership. When we talk about leadership, sometimes we also mention about the management. Some people cannot distinguish leadership and management, so they think they are the same, in fact they are different, meanwhile, they cannot be separated easily. For instance, there is a director works in a big company, for this company he is a manager, however, for the department he works, he is a leader. So we can get a result that every manager should be a leader ,and every leader must know management.
In our group, honestly, we did not have a team leader, the reason might be no one want to be. In my point of view, actually there is a leader in our group, she mentioned about our project aims and objectives, so we can keep moving toward it without make any mistake. She has done a lot of work to make sure our project is in the right process, such as sent email to told us when and where we meet, if we had not reply her email, she will sent message to inform us to make sure we all know and attend the meeting, then we can solve the problem in the meeting ,after the meeting separated individual work properly and told us it must be done before next meeting, in addition, she also need to send email to client and supervisor to told them where we are and which aspect we need to improve.
In my point of view, our team leader’s helpful support could be one of the most contribution to achieve our goal. When we faced the problem that cannot be solve easily, she will encourage us to speak out what we think, and chose the best idea to deal with that problem, and sometimes she also show her opinion to inspire us to generate more ideas and think the question deeply. Her individual behavior affect me, and that makes me work hard, in other words, she changed my attitude, and make me do this project seriously. When I have any question about my work that I cannot solve by myself, I will ask her for help, and she always show me the way how to deal with that problem. Once a time I cannot do my job well, and she gave me some advices to help me to modify my work and make it better.
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Through the help from the leader, I have learnt that keeping focus on the project’s aims and objectives is very important in anytime, and it can make sure we are in the right way and keep moving to achieve it. I know some weaknesses of mine from this project, so I need to improve my capability in order to solve the hard problem by myself and at the same time I also need think more carefully when I do my work.
Teamwork is an important element for a team to achieve success. In order to understand team work , we should know what is team first. If we look for the definition of team in a dictionary we may find that team is some people grouped together to achieve a goal. According to Larson and LaFasto(1989) , the definition of team :There are two or more people in a team; it has a specific performance objective or recognized goal to attain; and co-ordination of activity among the members of the team is required for the attainment of the team goal. From above , teamwork can be simply seems as work as a team to achieve the goal.
In the teamwork I noticed that the communication may be one of the most important factor to make the team success. When we started to do this project, we began to communicate with each others. In our team we decided to communicate by email and facebook, and we also exchange our phone number with each other in the first meeting (see appendix 1) . On one hand, communication can help us to familiar with each other and improve our relationship, on the other hand, through the discuss we can generate more ideas and learned more knowledge from each other. There were about 2 to 3 meetings per week to talk about what we had done and discuss what we need to do next, and we also can communicate by email if we faced the problem cannot solved by themselves. The good communication make us to do the work in high efficiency, because we solve the problem very fast, meanwhile, the ideas and methods from each group member made this project become easier and better.
Actually through the teamwork we had done before, we all familiar with the team cooperation, and understand its significance. As we know do a marketing plan is a big task, because it need to do a lot of research before we decide the strategy and do the marketing mix ,and this will cost plenty of time, so this is a very hard work for individual to finish it . The cooperation can make this project more easier and smoothly, and a good cooperation must be base on the good communication, so before we started to do our individual work, we also need to understand what other member’s job through the communication, so when we finish our personal work, we can put each one’s work together and make it coherent as a whole.
The team role is also a very important factor for a team, if every group member played the right role in a team, and this team can make the whole project process in high efficiency and smoothly. According to Belbin’s team role model, we can clear know which role we are, so this is useful for a team to assign jobs to each member, because we all understand what kind of work we are good at.#p#分页标题#e#
For me, I am team worker and implementer, as a team worker, I can cooperative with my group member very well, but sometimes I just listening during our meeting without show up my points; as a implementer, I would like to turn the idea into practical action, in fact I am not a good implementer, because a good implementer should be disciplined, and sometimes I do not want to do the personal job, and do a bad job in the end.
There is a big difference between theory and practice, and this consultancy project give us a platform to put theory into practice. Through this project in the past two months I felt that everything I had learned is so useful, and this project also help me to review the knowledge that I studied in the past year, however, if I want to use these knowledge flexible in the future , I still need to do a lot of practice and at the same time I also need to study further. In terms of project management, as I said before, we had done a proposal and Gantt charts to make sure we keep moving to our goal, in spite of there was a problem in organize phase, finally we overcome it. In terms of leadership, a good leader can lead the team to success, because leader can encourage team member and keep the project is in the right process. For me, our leader give a lot of help and advices during my individual work. In terms of teamwork, we had the good communication through email and meeting, so we can discuss the questions and share our ideas ,and we also cooperate with each other very well. In addition, we played different role in the team, and this helped us to do the work what we good at. For me, I am team worker and implementer in our team, so sometime I just listen rather than talking.
For the future, some aspects I need to improve, in terms of the telephone interview, I found that I am afraid to fail, so when this problem come out, my first idea is to give up it and make another method to do the survey, and this is will not be happen next time, because I have learned do not give up, if I assist on one thing, I will achieve my goal. I also need to improve my personal capability, so I can solve question by myself and give advice to other person, and maybe I will become a leader one day. In terms of my team role, I will involve the group discuss more positively instead of just sit there as a listener, and I will also try to be a good implementer and do a good job.
Boud, D., Keough, R. and Walker, D. (1985), Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning, Kogan Page, London.
Moon, J.A. (1999), Reflection in Learning and Professional Development, Kogan Page, London.
Project Management Institute, Inc. (2004). Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. 3rd ed. Newtown Square.#p#分页标题#e#
Trent,J.R.(2004). Team leadership at the 100-foot level. Team performance Management. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Available at: www.emeraldinsight.com/1352-7592.htm
Weiss, Joseph W. and Wysocki, Robert K. (1992). 5-Phase Project Management. Cambridge, MA. Perseus Books.
Weth, A. (2005). Key Leadership Traits of an Effective CIO for Managing and Developing Teams in Culturally Diverse Work Groups. GRIN Verlag.