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To manage group diversity, you need group standards. Standards are rules of the road for how different group members interact with one another. Standardization means to create and establish such rules. It does not mean that everyone agrees with one another all the time and that different groups members cannot think, act, and feel differently from one another. Standards are not about removing differences. Standards are for managing differences in a structured way, so both group and individual needs are respected. Setting the right standards for a group is as much an art as a science. The following ideas should not be considered a fixed recipe for every group situation. Rather, these are just a few suggestions for handling issues that experience has shown often arise in IT workgroups.
How and when will the group meet?
When students debrief about their IT project groups at the end of a term, they almost always wish the group had set better ground rules about how often to meet. Setting some sort of schedule is a good idea. For most groups, meeting once a week or at most twice a week is enough. Individual team members may want or need to communicate more frequently than that, but usually a weekly whole group meeting is helpful for keeping the group on track. In today’s world, job shifts and class schedules are all over the place, so finding a convenient time when everyone can meet is a challenge. For student work groups, weekend meetings times often are best. Yes, this cuts into family and personal time. But school on top of work is a balancing act in the best of situations. Realistically, to qualify as an IT professional, you need to experience IT work group meetings. So consider what you are really trying to accomplish with your IT studies and set your priorities – and your personal schedule – accordingly.
Face-to-face or online?
In the post-COVID IT world, this is the question that every company is trying to figure out. One theory is that face-to-face is needed for personal bonding, for creativity, for innovation, or for showing commitment to the company and its projects. Another theory is that commuting to a job site is a waste of time and a waste of gas (or bus fare) and work from home turns out to be the most productive approach for the jobs that really need doing. We will not settling that debate here! Your school experience with work groups (both face-to-face and online) will help you form an opinion about how you, personally, like to work and what sorts of employer policies you would be willing to go along with. Maybe one way to handle this is “both and” rather than “either or”. Perhaps your team could call one face-to-face meeting to get organized and launch the project. Then maybe weekly online check-ins after that. Another occasion calling for face-to-face might be to rehearse for a big team presentation or to crash the deadline on a critical project submission. Again, these are just ideas. You need to experiment and find out what works