My Role in the Project

In dividing up the responsibilities in the report I was allocated the role of dealing with the references and appendices. While at first I thought that this would be a small role it proved to be larger than what I had originally anitipated.

Essentially the role involved gathering the team's references and listing them according to the Hrvard style. I also had to go through the report and check that the references in the text were properly done.

As I was in charge of this, it allowed other team members to give me the essential details of their references without having to worry about them being in the correct format. This also freed up their time so they could concentrate more on the content they were producing. Going through this list took me more time than I thought it would. Between editing my own podcast section of the report and formtting the reference list, the task took about two days. The most time consuming aspect of this was making sure that the internet links referenced worked, and using the cite it right templates to make sure the details were listed correctly.

The most dfficult task - and which took me all of Tuesday and Wednesday to complete was getting all of the details into the final report. This was mainly because the final draft was updated on Tuesday night, so much of my work on an earlier draft had to be redone into the completed version. Also on Wednesday I had to get extra details off team members so that all of the references could adhere as closely as possible to the templates.

However I learned a lot from the experience, and it definitely improved my attention to detail. It also introduced me to an essentail part of working in a collaborative effort to produce a document, which is dealing with the numerous updates to the final product which occurs frequently in such projects.

What I found is that my role was about being prepared to make changes and to deal with whatever occurs for the sake of producing a better document, which is what working in a team is about. And while my role didn't involve producing as much content as the others, it did take a lot of time to complete properly, as the content that I did produce had to adhere to specific templates. Therefore my time was taken up in communicating with other team members, co-ordinating my efforts with the editors, and chacking and rechecking all of the relevant details.

I also learned that spending time on small details is no bad thing, and that just because a role seems small at first does not mean that it is unimprtant.

However it was a different role than anything I had performed before, and it was exciting to be fully involved at the end of the project when the activity was at its highest. All in all, I found it to be a satisfying role, particularly when I handed over my finished work to the team editor on Wednesday.

Brian.