Continuous Improvement
Jimmy’s suggested to have Tom put up the comments about why we received the grade we did so we could learn and grow from this experience was a fantastic idea. This concept immediately made me think of our project, and about the importance of evaluation and continuous improvement. Throughout the project, the only real evaluations that we had were the few peer assessments along the way. However, the peer assessments focused entirely on individuals within the group. The comments were posted so that we could improve in the areas that needed it, and I think that really helped us grow as individuals
I started to think about what things might have been like if our group developed a weekly assessment system where we ultimately evaluated where our group currently is, and where we ultimately want to be. I think we made a serious error by not evaluating ourselves (as a team) along the way. By not doing this, we completely took the continuous improvement element out of the picture. I think a lot of the things we are currently coming up with concerning what we learned or what we should have done differently, are all things that we could have discovered earlier by simply talking about our performance.
I think our group became so caught up with the external elements that we were dealing with that we forgot to analyze the internal. When we did in fact find time to focus on the internal, it was directed towards focusing on the individual. One of the things that we came up with that we decided we would have done differently was to have a set meeting schedule (i.e. Mondays and Wednesdays at 8:00). We had trouble dealing with our schedules but if we had set a time that we ultimately managed the rest of our schedule around, then it would have been a lot easier. This is something that Matt Marchant’s group recommended to the rest of the class, and is something we agreed was a great idea, but for whatever reason never decided to implement it. In our weekly meetings, I think we could have taken 10-15 just to talk about how we are doing and set mutually agreed upon goals which we could strive to achieve. At the next meeting, we would take out our goals and evaluate our performance based on those goals. I think continuous improvement is something we focused on in class, but our group never really managed to incorporate it into our group.