 Hello and welcome to Collaboration and Group Project Management. My name is Sarah Sweeney-Bear and I am the Project Design Studio Manager for the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. The Project Design Studio is a space that's designed to support collaborative projects for students, whether those be class-based academic projects or independent entrepreneurial community service type projects, whether you are at the very, very early stages of that project or you have just found that you need a little more support along the way, we are here to help. So please check out our webpage on the Libraries website to learn more about that service. Today we're going to talk about some general best practices for collaboration, some social and attitudinal approaches to collaboration that make it more effective, some online collaboration specifics as well as some tools and resources to help along the way. So we're going to start by talking about best practices for collaboration. And the first thing that you want to do when you are assigned a new project or you choose a new project and develop a team is to set standards and expectations. After all, you can't hold yourself or one another accountable to expectations that have not been explicitly set. And by writing them down, you create a place that every member of your group can find information about what they need to do and have something to refer to if you need to talk to someone about not meeting expectations. So consider when and where will you meet? What should someone do if they need to be late or absent? How are you staying in communication? Would you rather folks email, call, text? Where are records and materials going to be kept, including the standards and expectations that you set in this meeting? These should be agreed upon as a team during your first meeting. You'll find that folks are more likely to stay accountable to an expectation that they feel some ownership over because they had a hand in developing it. Relatively to setting expectations, setting goals and writing them down can help keep everyone on track. It's important to have goals, but also to recognize that not everything will go according to plan. You may find that the original goal you had in mind becomes less valuable over time or that along the way, you find a new path that will help you reach your goal more effectively. So stay flexible, but definitely use that goal as sort of a guiding star to figure out where you need to go, especially if you start to feel lost. And remember that failure is part of the process. When something goes wrong, take a moment to consider why it went wrong and what it means for your project. Do you need to try a new method to reach your goals or just adjust your goals using new knowledge about how appropriate or feasible they are? Reaching the smart goals outline can really help you develop effective goals. So you want your goals to be specific and detailed. What do you want to do? Who's responsible for doing it? And what steps need to be completed along the way to reaching that goal? Goal should be measurable. Is it just a complete or not complete sort of task? Do you need a certain number of pages or visuals? It should be easy to recognize whether or not you have met your goal. Make sure your goals are attainable. Consider what resources you have available, including time and energy. Is it reasonable to expect yourself to meet this goal? And double check that your goals are relevant. Do they matter to you? Do they align with one another? And finally, your goals should be time bound. Give yourself a due date, whether there is one assigned or not. And don't make every goal's completion date that due date. Instead, build milestones into your goals so that you have a regular check-in and can avoid procrastination. To-do lists are a great way to keep track of goals. You should make sure to note when a task should be done and who is responsible for it in your to-do list. You can even nest minor tasks under the relevant major task or goal. Check in with this to-do list at each meeting and celebrate completed items in little ways. For instance, let the person who completed the task be the one to check it off and acknowledge the work that went into that task. Make sure you keep track of all of this information. Your standards and expectations, goals, to-do lists, and discussions. This means that you will need to actively listen to one another to make sure your record keeping is accurate. Give everyone a chance to look over notes at the end of a meeting to ensure that they reflect on what actually happened. Keep these records in a shared, accessible location so that the whole team is on the same page. Next we'll talk about some social and attitudinal approaches that support effective collaboration because as we all know, a bad attitude can ruin a whole project or an individual who has selfish goals in a project can sort of derail it and make the whole experience less enjoyable and less effective. So what attitudes and behaviors can affect the success of collaboration? Take a moment to think about this. Have you ever had a teammate who celebrated little victories and helped you feel a sense of accomplishment? Or how about one who wasn't reliable and made you feel overwhelmed with an undue share of work? While there are lots of behaviors that can support group harmony, these four are nearly universal. Be reliable. Trust is earned through consistent action over time. If you say you're going to do something, do it. If you find that you're going to be late or that you're feeling overwhelmed, be upfront and honest and don't be afraid to ask your teammates to help. Likewise, listen when someone is asking for help and don't assume they are just being lazy. Do not speak to intentionally wound someone. It will never feel as good as you think it will. If you find yourself incensed, explain that you need to step away for a moment and gather your thoughts. Express your frustrations in a healthy way without attacking someone. If someone upset you, those feelings are valid, but responding in kind is only going to escalate things. Earnestly try to resolve mistakes. If you mess up, thoughtfully consider and express what happened and explain what you will do to fix it. In practice, empathy. Don't assume the worst in people. Recognize that we all have other things in our lives that might affect our work to different degrees at different times. If someone messes up, talk to them about it, but come to it from a place of empathy. You're a team and the work of effective collaboration is just as much the group's responsibility as is the project itself. Hold yourself accountable to healthy communication and collaboration behaviors. If a problem or conflict arises or someone isn't meeting the expectations set from the beginning, address it quickly before resentment builds. If the problem can't be resolved within the team, bring in a mediator who is less emotionally involved, such as a professor or your friendly library collaboration expert. So how is online collaboration different? Most of us collaborate online either in part or for an entire project. So what kinds of challenges arrive when you introduce an online component to a collaborative project? So for example, if you're not meeting in person, it can be harder to hold one another accountable because it's harder to express nuance through online communication, tone of voice, body language, facial expressions. All of these contribute to how information is perceived when you're in person, and all of these are muted in online environments. It can be tough to choose a meeting platform that works for everyone's work styles and technological capabilities. If you don't have a central work location to store files, like an office computer or a filing cabinet, it becomes necessary to find effective cloud storage. Technical issues can add obstacles and delays. And online collaboration and communication is fatiguing because it just doesn't come to us naturally. Structure becomes particularly important in online collaboration. Make sure your materials are kept in a location that everyone can access so that everyone has the information they need to complete their tasks. Find a meeting tool or two that meets your needs. Make sure everyone is very clear on when and how you're meeting. You may have to take some extra considerations when collaborating online. Give one another grace. Not everyone is tech savvy and someone might encounter some obstacles, especially if a tool is new to them. Have some self-awareness. Do online tasks become out of sight, out of mind? Set yourself reminders. Does seeing your own camera image add to technology fatigue? Hide that part of your window. Do you regularly have Wi-Fi issues? Give yourself a little extra time to set up for meetings, or see if you can find a location with a more reliable connection. Check in with one another. When we don't see one another in person, it's easy to skip the socialization that naturally occurs at the beginning of in-person meetings. Feeling connected to one another can help you collaborate better. You're more likely to ask for help from a friend, or take a gentle approach when someone you know and care about messes up. We're going to end today's workshop by talking about some tools and resources that can help with collaboration. So here are a few tools that can help with record keeping. Google apps work well with one another and tend to make good record keeping tools. I happen to like Todoist for keeping track of goals and tasks, which I'll talk a little bit more about later. There are lots of virtual whiteboard tools out there that one can make, that can make online discussions more akin to in-person ones. And project management tools like Trello and Asana work well for keeping track of longer, more complex projects. Now, I don't necessarily use Todoist as the main tracking tool for any groups I'm in. Instead, I use it for myself to be a better collaborator. It lets me assign things to projects and give things due dates. It's easily rearranged and organized. Since I usually have a lot of projects going on at once, it helps me keep things from falling through the cracks. If you're using it as a team, you can even tag particular people in particular tasks. There are lots of free online whiteboard tools and they're all a little bit different. I won't go into depth on all of these except to say that I have more experience with Miro and Jamboard than any of the others. And Jamboard is by far the easiest of the two. Most of the meeting and communication tools that are available have done a good job keeping up with one another as far as features go. Honestly, Zoom, which is the one that we use most often, is the one that I find is least effective for my longer term collaborative projects, only because the record keeping is a bit clunky. I like that other platforms like Google Hangouts, Slack, and Discord save records of chats and make it easy to find files that were shared. On Zoom, you can record your discussion and set your chat to save as a text file. But these are typically saved in a location that's less integrated into the app. And that's it for today. If you have any questions or would like to discuss anything more in depth, please feel free to contact me.