It’s the last week of the collaboration project, the documents are due for submission on the 26th of March. This is my reflection on week 9.

What happened?

As expected, this week was quite busy. As the deadline looms, everyone seems to kick into life to get the loose ends sorted before submission.  I didn’t see any messages on Slack until Friday. The French document has been submitted and the images have been cropped by the American team. I was asked to give the document a final proof. I found a sentence that was still in English, not sure how it got missed but one of my team members seemed to fix it quite quickly.

Can I make sense of the situation?

Over the past two weeks our team leader has changed. I haven’t really heard from our original team leader. Big thanks to Robert, he has really helped to move things forward and liaise with the guy in the French team doing the translation. I’m not sure how much work the French team actually did on the translation. Robert mentioned that his wife can translate so I hope he didn’t actually do too much of the translation work himself. The French team (I use “French team” very loosely, it’s just one guy) did send an email and reply to some Slack messages to say he’d placed a document in the Google drive. All I know is that after that e-mail, I checked the drive and there was a document in there. It’s been difficult to tell who has completed which parts of the work, everyone seems to be picking up the document, working on it and creating a new version. 

I haven’t done too much this week, the workload has been fairly low on this project since the translation phase started. Apart from pointing out the English sentence, the document is pretty much ready to go. 

What was good and bad?

The issues have been identified and corrected, we now have a English pdf and a French pdf ready to go. Not sure who corrected the English sentence in the French document….but it’s been updated. Robert tried to arrange a meeting this weekend, but it was too last minute for me. I need at least a few days to be able to schedule something like this in. 

What else could I have done?

I suppose I could have suggested we have a meeting at the beginning of the week, and arranged something for late this week. As I’m the one who needs a few days notice, I should have maybe mentioned that at the beginning. I suppose we should have outlined this in our communication plan right from the start.

What have I learnt?

It would have been good to have set some milestone meetings at the beginning of the project. We all knew the deadline was the 26th of March, so we should have put something in the calendar for a call this week.

My final blog post for the collaboration project is now due. I am hoping to collect all my thoughts and provide a summary on the project in it’s entirety next week.