Innovation Teams

In my opinion, the most interesting, challenging, and effective class in the BI is the “Teams” class. This class is a semester long group project where we work with real world client. The clients and projects are different each time around, and they are often interdisciplinary in nature, forcing us to branch out of our comfort zones and work with peers with entirely different backgrounds and skill sets. BI students take a variant of this class three times before graduating, each time with increased responsibilities until they finally lead a team. These projects can be very difficult, and they often require adaptation and present difficult leadership decisions, but they are easily my favorite part of this degree.

On my second time taking this class, in the Spring semester of 2020, there was a shortage of team leaders, so I volunteered to lead early. I had an fairly large and experienced team at my back, and a my client proposed a project that involved UI design, one of my interests, so I thought I was prepared to take on the semester. I was not. One of my team members dropped the class almost immediately, another was unfortunately forced to withdraw early on. I was had only two team members left, one with no UI design experience at all, and both were taking the class for the first time. I was forced to significantly limit the scope of the project, and work especially closely with my remaining members, since there would usually be more experienced members on the team to help mentor them. We took a hit, but we were surviving, and then March of 2020 rolled around, and everything was thrown into chaos. I made a lot of mistakes on that project, and I am still disappointed with what we were able to deliver, but I know I grew tremendously from that project.