Groups Projects

As part of my final semester at ITT we have to do a group project in order to graduate. Personally, I find it lame, but they want to teach us how to work with others. Anyway, the project is to design a home for a client. Pretty simple right? Well, from the beginning I wasn't to happy about my group because we didn't get to pick our groups. Yes, I'm one of those people who needs things to go my way or else. Except for one person I worked with last semester I didn't know any of the other guys or their work style. The one guy I did work with last semester his work was okay, not great, just okay. Somehow I got nominated as "team captain" and I'm now put in charge of organizing the task for each member. Why? I don't know, it's just how my luck is. Like I said, I don't know any of these guys and what their strengths are so it's extremely difficult for me to assign them tasks that would suit them. Frustrating? Yes.

Fast forward to this week. We are now in my 3rd week of school and we have 7 more weeks to work on this project before time is up and we turn in our final project. Here's what I had to deal with. I designed the floor plan of the house and got it approved by our client and my group. I emphasize group because everyone at the time seemed to agree on the layout of the house, clearly I was wrong. I assigned the job of drafting the floor plan on the computer to one guy. I gave him the sketched layout and dimensions of each room, not a difficult job and pretty easy to follow I thought. Once again, I was wrong. He totally did his own house design. He rearranged rooms and made rooms way to big. Not only did he not do what I told him to do, but he went off and did more than what I assigned to him! I admire "going the extra mile" idea, but not when you do it wrong. It was a total mess this week and I spent most my time arguing with him and correcting his mistakes.

This whole "team captain" thing is harder than I thought it was going to be. I mean I knew going into this project with a group of people I didn't know was going to be rough, but not this rough. We're meeting on Saturday and I pray that I (we) don't have another episode like Tuesdays. I'll keep you updated.

Peace.