How blockers and challenges makes a team trust each other more

Abdi Mo — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 18:49:37 +0000

Many projects are structured to work in teams, and each team includes employees from different cultural backgrounds with different skills and talents. Teams that include members with a diverse personality and knowledge are better equipped to achieve more production and efficiency because they include creative members, organized members, and members that are somewhere in the middle. Although it may seem like a chaotic brew of personalities at times, the mixture of strengths and weaknesses helps avoid the problems of teams that all have the same personalities. For example, the labs team I am in includes people that are highly creative which at times may seem like more work and potential obstacles, but it's beneficial to hear more than one way of approaching a task or solution to a problem. To balance this, we also have members that prefer focusing functionality over features, which helps give a better perspective on the realistic outcome of a project even though it does not seem as unique at times.

An issue that occurred early in the process was lack of perspective of the two frameworks integrating with each other. Our team had some sense of how data science and the web was going to come together in the product, but we had some confusion on what each side needed from each other. I was able to address this issue when I wanted more clarification on how I can provide the data science members the data they needed, and this sparked a group meeting which broke down everyone’s role and impact for this project. Our ability to communicate effectively when we reached an issue/concern that impacted everyone was what made us such a good team. People were open to express concerns clearly and effective, so we resolved issues as soon as they arose.

“There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.”– Malcolm X

My teammates tend to describe myself as someone who can be helpful, reliable, and resourceful when it comes to meeting a certain deadline, common goal, or completing a task. I tend to make my teammates' concerns or challenges a top priority at times, and am willing to make sure everyone who is confused or uncertain about something gets clarification or the resources to understand.

... But that doesn't mean our experience was free of challenges or blockers along the way.

One of the biggest challenges we faced as a team was building out a mentee-mentor pairing system that involved filtering out a mentor's available time and matching them up with available mentees.

In the end, we were able to find a solution in using a data table with editable columns and rows to filter between a mentors & mentees as by the time slots they were free, and save the pair in their respectable slots

    <ReactDataGrid
        columns={columns}
        toolbar="true"
        rowGetter={i => rows[i]}
        rowsCount={rows.length}
        onGridRowsUpdated={onGridRowsUpdated}
        enableCellSelect={true}
        minHeight={350}
      />

Whenever I am in a setting of picking roles or tasks in a team, I tend to organize my priorities while accomplishing that task by importance/impact in contribution to a team. By doing this, I am able to be a meaningful contributor to a team while also being resourceful for any help or clarification from other team members as well. I also just make sure that I put myself in a position where I can help in a way that isn't delaying my progress, or setting some time aside instead of completely stopping what I’m doing in order to help.

By being with my team and experiencing this, I feel like any challenge or obstacle was easy to get past and the progress was at an all time high!

Teamwork really makes the dream work! - What I was able to learn from collaborating with a team

Abdi Mo — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 21:02:38 +0000

As we wrap up our final sprint for Lambda Labs, it has been a very fun journey, but not one that hasn’t seen its fair share of setbacks and challenges. I feel like however, embrace challenges as I believe overcoming challenges makes you stronger as a person.

Getting to work for a stakeholder who is involved in a non-profit in sheltering the homeless was really a eye-opening experience for me, considering that our product of a digital intake form would truly have an impact on a problem, which really tested my passion and skill in solving a problem and collaborating with a team who share the same end goal in finding the solution.

It's definitely motivated and pushed my work ethic knowing that this would impact the lives of people who check into Family Promises of Spokane, in easing the transition and process of a family's worst day of their lives, as well increase the efficiency for the staff members who worked there too.

Throughout planning with my teammates on user stories and roles for these applications, and designing wireframe and schemas for them as well, I truly believe the two weeks we've spent getting together and making plans was worth it. It definitely brought new ideas and challenges we didn't initially think of at first, and also increased our communication and trust within one another when giving input or feedback in the process.

The challenges we've encountered individually when working on a task really tested our trust and communication skills in reaching out and getting advice or feedback for overcoming them. It was definitely great to know we can count one another for help and accountability as well in our daily standup meetings. One example of a challenge we've faced was figuring out the database schema for the application. We didn't quite get that much clarification from the stakeholder considering that he wanted to see what we could come up with. There was a point in time where my team member Leslie and I were frustrated, and it wasn't until we reached out to another member on our team who gave us his take and advice which really was beneficial considering he had experience.

One of the bigger pieces I worked on was implementing a modal that displayed additional information for a guest when clicked on in the list of members. This was a feature that was intended for supervisors in order to be able to view demographics, barriers, and other factors such as whether or not they had a pet. This was a task that had many factors and obstacles to consider when implementing it, such as handling state and making the feature dynamic enough so that the information is accessible for each member and not result in errors being thrown.

What I originally intended to do at first was filtering the members by the id the matched the member that was clicked on to view their additional info.

function filterIt(id) {
const result = state.data.filter(item=> item.id = id)
setModal(result)
}

Eventually what I actually did after figuring out that the id of a member was in chronological order was simply just returning the index of the member inside on the on-click event of the button, which really made it so easier and efficient to render the information instead of fetching twice!

{
    icon: InfoIcon,
    tooltip: 'More Info',
    onClick: (event, rowData) => {
      setModal(state.data[rowData.id]);
       toggleModal(event);
               },

All in all, getting to collaborate with a team with the same interests towards a common goal of solving a problem that impacts people really made me become more ambitious and eager to work in the same setting again. Its amazing to know that you got a support system that could keep you accountable and also be resourceful when you need it the most! If you put trust in your team members and communicate effectively by either giving input or receiving feedback, the skies really the limit in what you can accomplish!

DEV Community: Abdi Mo

How blockers and challenges makes a team trust each other more

Teamwork really makes the dream work! - What I was able to learn from collaborating with a team