When we first started learning about this industry seminar assessment task, I had my reservations due to the relatively massive size of the group. The past three years most of the group assignments involved teams of three to six, but this one involved about fifteen! It was a bit concerning as I wasn’t sure how we would go about splitting up the work evenly and fairly. With such a large amount of people, it would seem impossible to get everyone to contribute the same degree of time and effort to the project, so there would definitely be some people who would end up doing more than the rest, and others perhaps a little less.
But eventually I learned that, with a good group, this wasn’t too much of a concern. If anything, it was actually a welcome to relief to be delegated a certain area of work to focus on and not have to worry about the whole project. When you’re working in a smaller group, if one person doesn’t pull their weight, you find that you’ve got to do a much larger portion of the work if you want to cover for them. That’s why it was refreshing to be able to compartmentalise, and focus completely on what you had to do and not have to worry on the other aspects of the project.
In terms of my group’s project, my main job leading up to the seminar was to work on the promotional video, along with a small team of some of the other group members. I’ll go into a bit more detail about our process of creating the video, but for now I’ll mostly just talk about how our sub-group worked in relation to the other teams.
As I said, it was a really nice change of pace to be able to focus on a single aspect of the larger project and be able to really hone in on it. Of course, there was a lot of collaboration with the other sub-groups; we were constantly communicating with the poster and graphics team to make sure our branding was consistent, and we were always in contact with those in charge of the guest management and seminar planning so that the information we conveyed in the video was correct. But at the same time if an issue popped up in one area of the seminar preparation, for example the organising of the guests, as selfish as it sounds, it was nice to be able to say ‘that’s not my problem, I’ll let the people in charge of that area take care of it.’
It really came down to trust, the trust that the rest of your group would pull through, and I’m glad we had it. It really did make the process of organising and promoting this seminar much more stress-free and enjoyable, and I’m happy that’s how one of my final assessment tasks in this program turned out.