High Impact Teams in Technical Environments

Welcome! This is the web site for the CS8803 Seminar on High Impact Teams in Technical Environments.

Designed with input from individuals who work with teams at Harris, Cisco, Autodesk, Sonic Wall, Catalyst, Infosys, Microsoft, and PayPal, course objectives are designed to:

Promote an understanding of the different ways in which organizations use teams;
Theoretically and practically expose students to many aspects of team development, including forming teams, growth and development of team skills and facilitating high performance teams;
Increase awareness of personal style and its potential impact on team performance;
Examine practical issues encountered in teams, such as within-team conflict, communication, decision-making, effective global/virtual teams, reward systems, and project management;
Provide opportunity to learn first hand about teams through participation in one or more teams during the term;
Develop a further understanding of all aspects of teams as used in organizations in a way that positively impacts current and future career potential.
Provide an opportunity for you to receive feedback regarding your own personal style and its impact on team performance
Examine implications for technical teams

The class will meet each Wednesday from 5:05 to 7:55 PM and will be taught using a variety of modes including discussion, lecture, guest presentations, simulations, videos, and team projects. Several self awareness feedback instruments will be administered to students to explore style and its potential impact on team processes and group relationships. Students will receive feedback about their impact on the team experience.

Team Topics Project and Presentation
Students will work in teams to creatively explore/research/gather data from interviews and other sources about a team related topic. Materials will be organized into a resource document that will be a collective product of this class and will include readings, exercises, cases, web-based sources, etc. Students will have this product for future use in jobs interviews and future work. Your team will be responsible for a one hour in class бзeventби that you create to educate us about your topic area. Team members will receive the same score on this assignment, unless indicated to the contrary in the peer evaluation. Reflection paper/journal will be required from each student, describing the journey of the team, challenges experienced, description of evidence of stage development, and personal learnings in light of related course concepts.
Groups will choose from the following topics:
Дл IT Project Management
Дл Virtual Teams
Дл Diversity: Why Itбжs importantбKImpact on Teams/Gender/Ethnicity
Дл eXtreme Project Management
Дл Six Sigma Teams
Дл Managing Global Teams
Дл TBA (you may propose a topic)

Team Field Project
This course requirement is a team-of-two assignment. Each team will observe one team meeting, interview individual team members, then describe and assess a team outside of class, in either the Undergrad HCI class that works in teams or a real work environment. The paper will be typed, double-spaced, and not exceeding 15 pages, (excluding any appendices and references). The paper should include a description of the type of team studied, a history of the team's implementation and development, assessment of team performance indicators, and an evaluation of the current status (including problems the team is facing and your team's suggested solutions). Course concepts and material should be integrated where appropriate and referenced. Real names should be excluded from the content of the paper.

During selected weeks students will be required to find, read and summarize a relevant article in less than one typed page, for inclusion in our course resource handbook we will develop together.

Your Resources for this project:

Tuckman Assessment.doc
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Roles in Groups.doc
elements of well functioning teams.doc
Tuckman Stages - Color.doc

Last modified 24 April 2008 at 2:22 pm by Maureen Biggers