This post includes reflection on Week 8 of the collaboration project.

What happened?

The deadline for our final submission is looming – 26th of March. I received a message from one of my teammates asking if I could look at the final file, crop the new French images and add them into the translated document. I agreed to this and started looking at the document this morning. It appears that the document has been translated and already contains cropped, French images! Hooray! However….it looks as though no one else can find this document?

Can I make sense of the situation?

I’ve concluded that members of the group are having issues accessing documents in Google drive. I’ve sent everyone a message in Slack, but haven’t had a response back yet. To me, the document looks good and ready to submit. I’ve also uploaded the document to Slack to give people the chance to see it.

What was good and bad?

The good news is the document looks done. The bad news is that some people don’t appear to be able to see it. French team are off the radar again. 

What else could I have done?

I’m not sure anything else could have been done at this stage. I sent the French team a message last week and still haven’t had a response.

What have i learnt?

I have learnt that tools can become a barrier to progress. This is something that I see on a day-to-day basis at work too. If you’re working in a virtual team, especially if you have a tight deadline, tools and processes must be easy to use, easy to follow and clearly defined. Although it’s unfortunate as sometimes you can’t tell if a process has worked until the end of the project and you analyse the lessons learnt (especially if you’re working on a different type of product).

I have next weekend to work on this project if there is anything last minute to pick up.