Navigating Group Projects & Work in College—and Beyond

How to Set Your College Group Projects Up for Success

Whether you’re figuring out how to lead a group project or looking for tips to strengthen your team working skills, here are tried-and-true steps for starting and continuing college group projects:

• Kick things off officially together. Don’t just disperse after being assigned a group project—meet as soon as possible to establish the working outline for everything that needs to be accomplished.
• Divvy up roles and responsibilities. During your kickoff meeting, decide who will be responsible for each portion of the group project. Cloud-based apps like Microsoft Project make it especially easy to literally assign tasks to whomever is responsible for their completion. Not everyone knows how to lead a group project, and not every group project needs a leader—now is the time to discuss whether or not the team needs a point person.
• Create a roadmap of each deadline. Call it a roadmap, call it a timeline, call it an action plan—whatever you call it, plot out when each portion of a project needs to be drafted, reviewed, and completed.
• Schedule check-ins at regular intervals. While members of your group project are sure to speak to each other without being told, regular check-ins are vital to ensuring everyone is staying on track.
• Stay accountable to yourself and your team. Part of communicating effectively in a group is being honest and staying accountable. If you’re having trouble meeting deadlines or are confused about how to approach a task, take advantage of the fact that you’re doing a group project—you’re not alone. Encourage the same from others by asking if they need any help or have any questions.

How to Resolve Conflict in Group Projects

Even the best-laid plans can go off the rails, and work on group projects isn’t immune. Conflict resolution is a key skill when it comes to group work—everywhere you do group work. Here are some tried-and-true approaches to mitigating—and, hopefully, resolving—conflict that may crop up during your work on a group project:

• Define roles and responsibilities before you set out to do the work. If conflict arises and you haven’t already done this, do it ASAP. The clarity that comes with having clearly defined roles is invaluable.
• Understand that the conflict is separate from your collaborators. Differences of opinion or work styles or just plain not getting along with each other is not the problem—focus on what needs to be done.
• Reframe conflicts as opportunities for the team to create a stronger end result. You likely won’t be able to change a collaborator’s opinion on a topic or approach, but if you move past that roadblock and onto why they have that opinion or approach, you can start to understand where their strengths and interests lie. Look for clues about how to move forward there.
• Communicate, communicate, and communicate. Communicate as often and as thoroughly as possible—without being a taskmaster and while remaining respectful of everyone’s time and resources. Ask questions to seek answers about how your collaborators are thinking and feeling as pertains the group project to understand their point of view.

We can’t always choose who we’re assigned to do college group projects with, just as we often don’t have a lot of choice when it comes to who our colleagues are in the workplace. Learning how to resolve conflict in group projects now will strengthen your ability to do it later when the stakes are higher.

How to Sharpen Your Team Working Skills with Apps & Technology

Whether your group project work is done with everyone sitting in the same room or with everyone spread out across the country, using technology to your advantage is a smart move. Consider making early and frequent use of these collaboration tools to make working on your group project run more smoothly:

• Shared calendars. Plan meetings, deadlines, and more with a shared group calendar to keep everyone on the same timeline.
• Unified and shared digital storage of assets. It’s easier to complete group work when it’s not siloed on the computers and workspaces of different group members—keep everything in a shared space in the cloud.
• Collaborative digital documents. Make full use of web-based word processing and spreadsheet programs that allow for more than one person to work at a time.
• Tracked edits and digital margin notes. Whether you use a collaborative document in the cloud or not, ensuring that you engage a track changes function and make notes about any questions or concerns keeps the work transparent and easy to account for.
• Task-based chat threads. Using threaded chats are a great way to communicate with your team while by default cataloging shared knowledge and past learnings.
• Video meetings. Long gone are the days when everyone had to be in the same room—or even the same city—to meet face-to-face to practice presentations or discuss deadlines. If your team is already leveraging Microsoft Teams for collaboration, it’s easy to use it to hop on a video call too.

You’ll always have to work on group projects; you started in grade school, are continuing with college group projects, and you’ll have more need for solid group work skills as you enter the professional workforce. Building good team working skills and habits in the classroom now will help boost your ability to be a team player outside of the college and in the office.