The (un)importance of teams

Team projects. What could be worse? Essay? You can sit down and crunch it up. Presentation? Sure, repeat the same process. Team project? Well, now you’ve hit a wall.

In its entirety team projects are an excellent exercise in cooperation and team working, all while providing the members with valuable insights into what corporate and/or personal projects may look like after the University is over. However, what I do not understand and disapprove of is joining people studying the same subject in the same team. Yes, in theory, a group of IT people seems like an appealing idea for an IT-based project, but in the end it depends on just one thing, and one thing only – who’s going to step up and lead the whole team. Again, yes, in theory you could work in unison, lending each other a hand with different tasks, but in the end, someone still has to step up and measure what each member can and cannot physically do. Abysmal on back-end programming, but excellent at frontend? Poor communication skills, but extremely good well-rounded programmer? And what if there simply isn’t a person, who will step up, take some sort of charge, and delegate tasks?

I do realize this may sound like overconfidence, but it’s once again experience that counts, even something as a study of management principles for two years. Putting people with no management skills together? That sounds too much like a recipe for a catastrophe. Once again, even in purely IT world I can clearly recognize the need to have at least some knowledge of management techniques and principles, and find the courage to step up and bear the burden of the management.

Software and hardware analogies are plentiful as to why you always need a sort of leader, someone or something delegating tasks to different parts of the system; be it processing cores and system processes, or simply program’s threads – without a manager and collision-avoiding approaches your system is going to be unstable and subpar in performance to other projects whose creators took the time to select and design a task delegator.

So, you may ask, what do I actually mean by all this? Team projects are a very useful experience to go through, however you cannot expect excellent results if you don’t take the time to create or define proper structure, or just throw the teams in medias res and expect them to catch up. Yes, there is always a possibility of them quickly applying a fluid structure, appointing the person who knows the most about the topic as a leader of the current project. And if that person know little to nothing about management, the validity of experience gained in the exercise is going to be vastly diminished; in the real world the teams or projects without a solid lead (be it a project lead or just a task lead) cannot survive. How can you learn anything from a team project exercise, if you don’t really have a team in the first place to go with your project?

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