• Tell me about a time when you worked successfully as part of a team.

Situation

In my second year of university, the whole year was split into group of 8 students and were given the task of writing an 70 page research report on different wide ranging Engineering topics, unrelated to our degree. The group of 8 students I was in was given the title “The Hydrogen Economy”.

The aim for the project was to spend the first two terms writing the report, to be submitted at the end of the second term, and then give a presentation about it after our exams in the 3rd term. The scope and plan of the project was entirely of our own devising, and to be fitted around our normal student life, of different lectures, coursework deadlines and study.

Task

After the initial research and planning, we split the project up into different sections, two people writing each section. This produced the bulk of the report, with each person contributing about 8 pages. My task was to write how fuel cells work, their efficiencies, and various technological benefits and disadvantages.

Action

The complexity and pressure came when we were compiling the different sections. Some tasks were delegated, such as writing the introduction and conclusion, collating foot notes and attributions, and making the formatting consistent. However we had underestimated the inconsistency in the style of writing throughout the report, and the overall flow of argument needed to be adapted to make it more understandable.

Result

The result was two students pored over the report to make corrections to these issues, while the rest worked on the delegated tasks. After these tasks were complete, we saw the progress that the two were making, and the way in which they were working, and were able to emulate their style in the remaining sections, thereby speeding the process up.

The mistake we made was not anticipating the variety of writing styles, and this meant that we left it late to make corrections and felt pressure from that, but from a teamwork perspective we did very well.