From left to right, we are Anton Pikkupeura, Erkka Juhaninmäki and Esa Niemi.
Anton is a third year bachelor’s student in industrial engineering and management. Erkka is a first year master’s student majoring in Human-Technology Interaction. He enjoys reading and sports (both doing and watching). Esa is a fifth year software engineering and UX student from Hervanta. He likes climbing and board games.
Our team’s project partner is Polar Electro. The project description was “How to Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Sport Exercise Guidance? Context is Polar and Polar’s customers”. We chose this project as our first option because all of us do or follow sports but are not exactly fitness models. The idea also seemed to be the most approachable one.
Our team’s goals are to stay open, communicate and make progress. We selected these goals as they are things that are crucial for successful project work, but in academic course work they tend to be forgotten. We are going to track and evaluate this by maintaining active communication in our Telegram group, following the progress of others, talking and solving impediments, allowing the project manager to make decisions and by setting soft deadlines before the actual dates.
We decided to try to divide the project work equally into parts so, that in theory everyone has the same amount of work to do at a given time. Anton is our Project Manager and also has prior experience of video editing, which will be useful with the video task. Erkka and Esa are more interested in doing the more practical work and Esa has also volunteered to do most of the talking in the video. We will make decisions and solve conflicts by talking them through and reaching a majority consensus.
Important factor in making our team work well together is to get to know team members well and to be able to trust in them to do the work divided. We believe this will get better as the project proceeds but now we have met couple of times and chatted in Telegram. We have decided on creating an online drive where we can easily share files and work on them together if needed. In addition we decide in advance who is responsible of what tasks and set internal deadlines on the tasks so that we can be sure they get done before the final deadline. We have emphasized that if a team member needs help with their task, they can always ask others to help and others will help gladly. We believe that key to productivity and effectiveness is transparency within the team and being able to work with the strengths and motivation of each team member.
We meet weekly on Thursday’s workshops, which is a good occasion to share the results of the work done. Despite meeting weekly, Telegram will probably be more useful for reporting individual contributions to other team members, because it’s more immediately available. This way we can keep track of the individual progress “in real time” and will also be able to help each other when needed. We will evaluate the contributions against the requirements and wishes of our project partner as well as the needs of the prospective users. The exact nature of this evaluation will become clearer when we get more information about the project.
Feedback on the first workshop
The first workshop was about team formation. Although knowing the theory about the matter is of course important, putting the theory in practice is vital in building team spirit. The activities were mostly fun, and probably helped these reserved Finnish males relax. Especially good was the task of trying to replicate a toy for a “customer” using only paper, markers, scissors, glue and sticky tape. Our team’s result was impressive and promises good for our future!
Polar Bears 