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Discussion on: Working in Teams

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Avalander

I don't think I have any good advice, but I do have some random thoughts. Read at your own risk.

I don't have experience with bootcamps, but the group dynamics that you describe sound quite similar to the group dynamics I experienced at university. So I'm going to try to draw some parallels from there.

First thing, you say that you don't like working in groups larger than two, that you don't do good without some direction, and that you don't feel comfortable taking the lead. Since you refer to your group as kids, I assume nobody else has work experience, so chances are that the others feel a lot like you do. When people lack direction, it's quite common that they will focus on whatever irrelevant task they can find to feel useful, like spending two weeks working on a single button, or start zoning out (as in talking about other stuff, browsing reddit or whatnot).

From this perspective, chances are your group would actually be thankful if you would take the lead and try to get something done.

Then maybe you can try to get them on board with Kanban. I'd approach it as yo team, so we've just learned about this Kanban thing, why don't we try it? Like, the worst that could happen is that you practice something that you've been taught about and that's widely used in the industry and find out that you don't like it, still you'll have the experience.

Next step would be to sit together and write down everything you need to complete the project. Well, it doesn't have to be everything just enough to get you started. A good way to start is asking yourselves what is the bare minimum we need to do to have a project that we could deliver the project and pass the assignment? and then add more stuff if you have time. Bonus points if you also discuss priorities and dependencies between tasks.

Anyhow, once you have a list of things to do, you can just set up a Kanban board with GitHub projects or whatever you use and start working on it. Chances are that the group will get some motivation to start getting things done. In the worst case, at least you'll have a list of tasks to start working on even if the rest keep slacking off (although in that case maybe a conversation with the instructor is due).