It is no secret that forming a group can sometimes be an awkward process. Especially if you’re approaching people that you haven’t worked with before or don’t know well. On the flip side, nobody likes to get picked last. The good news is that there are things you can do to firm up a suitable team. It all comes down to strategy.

Where to Look

By now, you will have gone through more group projects than you’d like to admit. You’ve sat beside hundreds of other students and you’ve hopefully found new friends in the crowd. The best place to start looking for people to join your Team Awesome would be connecting with those you’ve actually had experience working with. You would have seen these people in action and observed both their ‘wow’ moments and cringeworthy fails. If you’ve worked well with someone in the past, chances are that they’d be a suitable match for your Capstone team.

For those of you who have no group work experience in BTM and were miraculously teleported into the Capstone class or those who are honestly having a hard time finding the right people, there’s hope. The following table suggests some sources where you can find group members along with pros and cons of each source:

What to Look For

You’re looking for talented people who have an amazing work ethic. Seriously. And 4-5 of them. Do this as early as possible too because you never know who might have to drop out of the race due to challenges with prerequisites, personal issues, or other issues.

Ideally, you’ll choose people who you have experience working with. For those you haven’t worked with, interview them and be prepared to answer their interview questions. If they don’t have questions for you, it should be a red flag that their head might not be in the game. It’ll also be a good idea to ask for samples of work and test run those who show strong potential.

Whether you take a more formal interview or casual kind of approach, at the very least you should be looking for people who:

• Have an incredible work ethic
  • Integrity
  • Strong sense of responsibility
  • Focused on quality outputs
  • Disciplined in time management
  • Able to work independently when necessary
  • Strong desire to collaborate and work as a team
• Are open-minded
• Share the same goals and aspirations
• Offer complementary skill sets
  • Leadership, project management, research, organized, financial analysis, business analysis, oral and written communication skills, strategic, professional or amateur experience, problem solving, ability to simplify processes and complex issues, offers positivity and keeps peace

Five Important Reasons To Be Selective

1. You want to graduate. A non-performing member can drag you down, big time!
2. This is a client facing project and your reputation as well as the school’s image are on the line, especially as more and more clients use the Capstone project as a casting call to find potential employees.
3. Like it or not, you will be struck with your group members for eight long months.
4. The capstone project is very complex and requires extensive research and analyses. In other words, it is not something that you can do all by yourself.
5. For most students, the Capstone project offers real work experience in IT management from beginning to end. To get the most of the project experience and deliver the best results, you need people who can perform.

Team Pitfalls to Avoid

Some people do a really great job of only showing you the shiniest parts of themselves at first and so, naturally, it can be hard to detect their flaws. Though, there are some signs with skulls and crossbones stamped all over them that you can pick up on if you know what to look for. While recruiting team members if you notice any of the following in your interactions with them, run as fast as you can in the other direction:

• Not reliable
• Not responsive
• Not accountable
• Doesn’t seem to be motivated
• Produces poor quality work
• Often seems negative
• Argumentative
• Prefers to only work on their own
• Runs away from challenge and growth opportunities
• Isn’t truthful or honest
• Talks down to and easily criticizes others

Setting a Baseline

Once your team has been formed, it’ll be immensely important to establish expectations. Without hashing out these expectations early on, you may find that your team seems to be on different playing fields, aiming for greatly different targets.

True team unison is hard to achieve, but possible if the appropriate measures are put into place. Everything you do on your team should be intentional and done with great purpose. Doing things in this way forces your team to be cognizant of where they are, where they’re headed, and what’s required to get there. To get your ducks in a row, try the following suggestions.

Determining Roles

While the roles people play on each team might look vastly different, at the very least there should be a team lead/project manager (PM) and a client liaison within your group. Keep in mind that not everyone has the right skills to be successful in these roles and it would, undoubtedly, be too much for one person to take on both.

The PM should be someone who is organized, a good planner, is good at tracking and measuring progress, and ideally has some project management experience or training. This person will have a strong understanding of all the necessary deliverables, when they’re due, and which milestones to set up in order to ensure the team stays on track.

On the other hand, the client liaison will serve as the link between your team and client stakeholders. This doesn’t mean that they will be the only person to interact with your client, in fact, rather the opposite. The liaison will simply represent your team as a unified voice to get things like meetings in motion, questions asked of the client through written channels, and being the person to respond to client requests and questions (with the group’s input). The liaison should be someone who is comfortable communicating with managers and executives and one who is able to maintain a cool and professional demeanor at all times.

During your first team meeting, your group should work together to determine which other roles make sense given the skill sets present, your group dynamic, and the group culture you hope to uphold. For some inspiration, you can check out Harvard Business Review, Carnegie Mellon University, and Usability.gov. It’s important to note that regardless of what role each person takes on, every member of your team is required to contribute to written deliverables and to make equal oral contributions to the presentation.

Communication channels

How do you all communicate with each other? Whether in-person, through WhatsApp, email, or anything in between, your team will need to determine an internal and external communication strategy. This doesn’t mean that only one channel can be used, but it’ll be important to discuss the following:

• What is everyone’s preferred method of contact?
• Which channels are off limits?
• Will we uphold business hours? If so, what will they be?
• What forum is best for collaboration?
• When and how should we talk about team status updates?
• How will team deliverable reviews be conducted?
• Where should we store, revise, and track documents?
• What is the most appropriate forum for asking ad-hoc questions internally?
• What channels will be used to connect with our client?
  • What is the purpose of each channel?

Define a statement of success

It sounds really simple, in fact, so simple that most teams fail to ever consider what success looks like. Time and time again, groups dive right into the work without ever asking “Why are we here?”, “What do we hope to achieve?”, “What should the start, middle, and end look like?”. You can get started with work and quickly realize that things seem a bit off. Most groups chalk it up to just trying to get things in flight or perhaps a clash of personalities. What these groups fail to realize is that members might unknowingly be aiming for different targets.

Checkpoints and Working/Auditing Sessions

Without a doubt, your team should set up a schedule of internal stand ups, client check-points, group working sessions, and team read throughs. The frequency of each of these will be up to your team’s discretion, though it is advised that your team convene several times a week for brief stand up meetings (no more than 15 minutes) to discuss status, progress, roadblocks, outline questions, and next steps.

Sign an internal contract

There’s nothing that says, “I take this seriously”, more than signing a contract. You do it when becoming an employee, buying property, getting married, even when setting up a phone plan. Your team contract should contain all of the expectations that have been established – from attendance at meetings, to notification deadlines, to expectations around work contributions – and have an indication that everyone is in agreement and literally on the same page (with signatures). It essentially will act as your playbook, the guiding point to bring your team to success or help to reel everyone back in when things go awry. The contract can be prepared before the entire team is formed, but ideally, will be a group effort and possibly your first real shot at collaboration. Check out Chapter 19 for templates to help get you started.

Next Steps

By this point you’ve covered a lot of ground, but there’s still quite a bit to be done to be ‘winning’ ready.

Final Admin Stuff

Consider having a group email address. Doing this will keep project related things out of your personal inbox, and will allow your team to interact with the client on a more streamlined front. Your team can easily set up a Gmail account or work with CCS to get a Ryerson email address.

Also, once your team has been fully formed, have your group registered with the department by emailing trsitm@ryerson.ca with the names, student numbers, and contact information for each group member. Be sure to loop your team in on the email and if you’ve secured your client already, document that in the email.

Strengthening Your Team

It’ll be good to spend some time getting to know each other. You’ll be working quite closely together for 8 months, so it’s worthwhile to find out what makes each other tick, what motivations are, what pressure points there could be. Use the summer months to not only get yourselves ready for an intense course, but to also spend time with each other on social/casual/fun outings.

Creating Your Team Profile

It comes by no surprise that with little/no work experience and simply being labeled ‘students’, Capstone teams are often up against a great challenge in finding a client. Your team profile document can be used as a tool to help your team to sell itself to potential clients.

As you complete the Team Profile template found in Chapter 19*, consider the following as suggested by “Freelancing for Dummies”:

• What education might be required?
• What sort of experience might clients be looking for?
• Would any certifications be helpful?
• Which skills or special talents could be most beneficial to the project?
• What value can my team bring to the table?
• Why would a client be better off by ‘hiring’ us?