Critical Reflection Essays

Critical Reflection Essay on Teamwork3

Team Formation4

Working in a Team: An Excellent Experience5

Teamwork without Challenges: Yeah in a Perfect World!7

Teamwork in the Future8

Critical Reflection Essay on Project9

Phases of My Project10

Phase I: The Initiating Process10

Phase II: The Planning Process10

Phase III- The Executing Process11

Phase IV- The Monitoring and Controlling Process11

Phase V- The Closing Phase12

Specifically Challenging Areas in Project Management12

Project Management in the Future13

References14

Critical Reflection Essay on Teamwork

“Anything but group projects”, this is what I requested to my professor, when I had to work in a group project. Group projects engender terror in my heart. Conflicts, goofing, slacking and delaying of work are the words that come into my mind when it is about to work in a team. However, my professor emphasized me to work collaboratively in a team with my peers as she thought that this would be beneficial for me to explore issues relevant to the development of a high-performing team. Now after the completion of my project, I think I could never do my project in such a punctilious manner individually. Furthermore, working in to a team helps me understand the successful teams' dynamics and the root causes of the issues in dysfunctional teams. This essay will critically reflect on the process of team work, and as an experience, my overall impression of working in a team, and the challenges faced by me in the whole process. According to Barr and Dowding (2008), critical reflection is essential as it raises awareness and brings change where required. This view is also supported by Densten and Gray (2001), who believe that active reflection leads to leadership development.

According to leadership scholar and consultant Warren Bennis (1997),

“… the more I look at the history of business, government, the arts, and the sciences, the clearer it is that few great accomplishments are ever the work of a single individual, [moreover] … the problems we face are too complex to be solved by any one person or any one discipline. Our only chance is to bring people together from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines who can refract a problem through the prism of complementary minds allied in common purpose” (Bennis 1997, 3).

Teamwork is effectual collaboration between the members of a work team. Teamwork relies upon success of a team in coordination of specialized roles and expertise of individual members, which is sequentially contingent on fundamental self-management and interpersonal skills required for teamwork. My team was primarily a cross-functional team, i.e., people with different background and expertise was brought together. People with the background of finance, supply chain, marketing, and procurement comprised our team. Since our project was based on the innovative solutions for reduction of the lead time for a new product; therefore, while formation of team, bringing people with different expertise together was very useful. The reason was that teams possess the benefit of getting synergy (collective operation or action) to a task, i.e., the output of the team goes beyond the sum of the each individual's output on the ...