TeamAgreement

Like all dynamic systems, teams have life-cycles. It is important to consider the strategies and tools leaders use to support effective functioning at a team's various stages. When launching a team, we often spend time planning what to do and forget to establish how we want to work together to support our collective objectives.

Collaborative planning is a framework designed to initiate a conversation that helps transition a team from individual orientations to that of a collective. It helps develop a shared understanding and accountability for how you want to work together to best leverage your individual preferences, strengths, and goals towards an innovative joint outcome. Your collaborative plan is a dynamic repository of your shared agreements that you can refer to and update as you learn more about each other and the project.

Note this repository is public. If there is information you prefer not to write here, you can record your discussion on Slack instead. In particular, don't put phone numbers in this document!

Team Name

Rainbow Dolphin Gumdrop Boys

Collaborative Climate

A collaborative climate engenders balanced communication within the team, thorough exploration and discussion of ideas, active reflection on team dynamics, proactive management of interpersonal conflict, and a safe environment for taking risks.

Discuss a previous team experience you've had in which the team cultivated a strong collaborative climate. What behaviors contributed to creating this type of team climate? What behaviors are important to your capstone team for building a collaborative climate?

Write a paragraph here that captures your collective understanding of how you will create a collaborative climate.

Individual strengths

Discuss your prior experiences as relevant to the CS capstone in general and your project in particular. Capture your understandings here:

• Rajesh Narayan Good Listener Java / Javascript

• Paul Milloy Communication Team Management Documentation Java / Python / JS / CSS

• Ben Limpich Time Management JS / Python / DJango / Web Dev / NodeJS

• Jules Choquart Leadership Experience User Experience FrontEnd Web Dev ReactJS / Python

• Pablo Fernandez Team Management Python / Java / C++ / SQL / MySQL / PHP / CSS / JS

Individual goals

What do you each hope to learn or gain from the CS capstone? What would make you proud of your individual contributions? Capture your understandings here:

• Rajesh Narayan More practical experience, and working as a team towards completing a project based on the needs of a client. I would be proud of my contributions if the final product was to the client's satisfaction - the only important thing here is that we create a good finished product.

• Paul Milloy I hope to gain an in-depth understanding of database building and management as well as teamwork and conflict resolution skills in a CS work environment. I would be most proud if my individual contributions solved difficult problems we faced when working on this project.

• Ben Limpich Learn more about working in a group on a long term computer science project. I would also hope to learn some new technologies. Would like to make something useful for society.

• Jules Choquart Working on backend stuff so that I can be more versatile. Gain more practical experience. Having something to put in a portfolio after the project is completed. Having the project have real world use.

• Pablo Fernandez To be able to make a difference with the food bank and help them more effectively manage their inventory system, and not have to worry about legacy code or code flaws. The thing that would make me feel most accomplished would be the system being well received by BMAC.

Team Goals

Discuss your collective learning goals for the capstone project. What do you want to gain from the experience? What would make you proud of your work as a team?

Learning about the local institution would prove rewarding for our team. We would be very proud if our new software actually proves to be useful to BMAC. We would like to gain practical experience cooperating with our teammates and meeting project deadlines.

Team Coordination

Discuss any preferences for when you like to work, the technologies you might use to coordinate between meetings, your expectations for responsiveness, and any constraints that might limit when you are available. Consider potential roles you might need to coordinate your work during meetings or between meetings (scribe, contrarian, discussion facilitator, project coordinator, client contact, version control expert, etc.)

We should have established times when we can meet. We should use GroupMe as a groupchat in order to keep a consistent chat available.

Idiosyncracies

Have each team member finish the following prompts:

• Jules: I find it annoying when other people don't put it as much work as I am putting in, don't communicate what they are doing, and don't tell me when I am doing something wrong or not doing enough as per their standards. I know something about me that can annoy others is me telling you what to do, but am not aware of too many other things let me know if I am being annoying.

• Ben: My style of communication is very direct, so I appreciate people being straight with me. Also a personal pet peeve of mine is interruptions. I don't like when people talk over each other.

• Rajesh: I like direct communication, and prefer being told when I am not doing something right. I tend to work in spurts, and I like having a direction towards which I'm working. I don't like people making personal attacks towards each other - we are on a team, and I would like a certain level of professionalism.

• Pablo: I like having everyone be on the same page and helping people who don't understand certain things so that we can all cooperate together. I think that finding everyones best skills can help the team work together better.