This semester, I was a part of a team of six that made a website for Spire Hawaii, a local CPA firm. Our website was meant to display financial data, such as financial compilations and sustainability models, in both table forms and graph forms. The website was interactive in the sense that the user could manipulate certain conditions to create different scenarios for the forecast. This project had its ups, its downs, and most importantly, its lessons to be learned.
I took on this project with the hope of refreshing and expanding my knowledge about web development. Doing this project, I absolutely accomplished this goal. This project forced me to learn how to do all kinds of things I had not done before in web development, much of it due to the intricate relationships within the data. I learned to manipulate tables and became more comfortable writing more complicated code within a web development environment.
During this project, we had several meetings with the client to discuss our progress and receive notes as to where we could improve. I would like to think that we were successful in delivering on expectations during these meetings. We did our best between meetings to implement the notes given during the previous meeting, and I believe our team was successful in doing so.
That being said, there was a lot that could have been improved. We were not able to deliver a finished product at the end of the semester, and I think with better communication and team organization, we could have accomplished way more than we did. During the beginning of the semester, progress was good. Everyone had their part to do, and was able to accomplish it in due time. However, as the semester progressed, team meetings became less frequent, and a lack of attendance in team meetings became a prominent issue. As a result, I believe some of our team members were much less productive than they could have been.
In the beginning, we split up the team by page, so that each member had a page that they worked on. But once they were done, instead of picking up another task or working on other pages, some team members stopped working on the project altogether for weeks at a time. It also seemed that no other team members wanted to work on a page they had not created and taken lead on. This was an issue, because it led to some team members having five or six pages that they created who were swamped with work, and some team members with just one or two pages with nothing to do. Overall, the lack of regular meetings with the entire team and the lack of communication and team organization as a whole resulted in an inefficient use of team resources and an unfinished project.
This project served as a good learning experience. Not only did I learn more about web development from a technical standpoint, but also what it takes to create something as a team. The way our team was organized was poor. I have learned from this experience that a good team requires initiative and leadership, something this team didn’t have. Having a team leader that can rally and organize the other team members would have made this project much more of a success. Unfortunately, there was no one on the team willing to take up that mantle, and that includes me. It’s a big ask, especially when everyone has so many other classes and things going on in their lives. But I know that I had the ability to lead, and had I stepped up, taken initiative, and taken the responsibility of team leader, then maybe this team could have accomplished more. Going forward in future projects, I will try to take more initiative, communicate more with my teammates, and if need be, become a leader for the team.