People collaborate better when they recognise their faults.
Working on your own is one way to develop an application. This will always take longer than when you are able to work in a team. When you’re on your own you miss insights and feedback from a partner. It can mean you miss little things in your code, which slows down development.
When you switch to working in a team you do need to change your attitude to how you work. While you can do less on the project management side of things on your own. You know everything, and there is no one to keep in the loop.
This changes when you have team members. Now you need to let them know what you’re doing, and they need to let you know too. You should be working in the open.
Often we forget to guide students about these aspects of team work. We figure they might have picked this up in previous courses. Some do, but others don’t. They were ill that day, or started their degree at another institution. Maybe, they’re an exchange student. Do swap ’employee’ for ‘student’ here too, if that addresses your situation more directly.
Working in a team means ‘help’ is available
Collaboratively, now you have people to help you. You can talk to others when you’re stuck on something. It’s not just you and the internet. You can ask for help, or at least discuss the problems you’re trying to solve.
In longer-running teams, when it’s going for a term, or two, I encourage teams to set up rules around help. For example, if the team is not working as an ensemble, or mob, then there should be rules about when people ask for help. This stops them being stuck on a piece of work for days, when they could ask someone for help, and then move on to the next thing. Often the rule is something like this: work on a task, and if you get stuck on something, then look for the normal solutions on the internet. If you still haven’t solved it after three hours, then let the team know.
By doing this several things happen. First, the person has let the team know they are stuck on their piece of work. They are no longer in the dark. Second, the team can now help the person. Maybe someone knows the solution, and they’re quickly on their way. More likely, with several people approaching the problem, they can solve it faster than one person doing it on their own. As they discuss the problem together, they can build on each other’s suggestions, more so than someone working on their own.
This is a key reason that team collaboration is so powerful.
Help people help themselves
Some of your people will be embarrassed to ask for help. Their self-image doesn’t allow them to do this. You need to provide examples of relevant role models, who ask for help. Point out that it’s in their own self-interest to learn to do this now, instead of burning out trying to live up to their own self-image.
Especially remind them they are still learning. No one starts knowing everything, and making mistakes along the way is normal. They do this every time they start learning something new, such as in a video game.
Asking for help is a sign of maturity, and the sooner they learn this, the sooner, they can move forward in these tasks and life in general.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration.