Assembling Effective Teams In IE 4340: Engineering Project Management

This group of competencies poses an interesting challenge for instructors who wish to map them to their course assignment learning outcomes; in most team-based course assignments, either 1) students pick their own teams based on virtually no objective skills data where they naturally end up picking or being picked by the few people in the class that they already know, or 2) the instructor assembles the teams for them. Instructors are able to gauge and assess “teamwork” competencies, i.e. how well the team members work together, but they have no good way to assess whether or not the students are able to assemble their own teams in a systematic way that one would expect to happen in the professional environment.

Jaime Cantu, Assistant Professor of Industrial, Manufacturing & Systems Engineering, recognized this challenge and created a homework assignment designed to gauge students’ competencies for the third point, “seeks team members with skills appropriate for specific project requirements.” Dr. Cantu’s assignment instructed each student to assemble a “Dream Team” to construct a dress shirt, from scratch, utilizing numerous technologies and equipment found in the UTA FabLab. Construction of the dress shirt required use of 3D printers, laser cutters, sewing machines, the embroidery machine, and the screen press. (Photos of the finished projects are at the bottom of this post.)

Next, in collaboration with the UTA Libraries Maker Literacies project team, Dr. Cantu developed a survey that allowed students to self-assess their skills across a wide range of makerspace equipment and project management activities. The majority of questions were Likert scales where students selected their skill levels where “1” equaled no experience, and “5” equaled expert. Students were given the survey before their first visit to the FabLab in order to capture a realistic portrait of their beginning-of-semester skills levels.

We then de-identified the survey data and gave it to students with the homework assignment. Students were instructed to break the project into component tasks, and identify “Employees” from the de-identified data who were best suited to complete each task. In addition to assembling their Dream Teams, students were also instructed to assemble a set of more or less equally balanced teams that would put every student in the class on a team. Rather than having one team with all the best students, there would be several teams with some highly skilled members, some moderately skilled, and some non-skilled members. He called this scenario "Spread the Awesomeness."

There was a third team building scenario, the “Documentation Scenario,” included in the assignment that I don’t quite understand and will not attempt to describe in this blog post, but readers can download and see the full assignment to see all three scenarios in their entirety. Readers can also download the survey, the de-identified survey data, the lecture slides for this assignment, and a sample homework response.

While not every student ended up on their Dream Team, Dr. Cantu used their "Spread the Awesomeness" formulations to create teams. Having the students conduct this data analysis for him made it easier for him to divide the class.  

Dr. Cantu reports that the homework assignment was highly successful in allowing students to assemble teams based on real skills data, giving them an opportunity to gain competency in real-world team assembly that a real-life project manager would have to do. He used a rubric to grade the assignments, and provided the following graphic which illustrates that students met his the expectations for the assignment: