Communication Plan Feedback18/25
My general sense is disappointment on completion of your first RING assignment. In class, you were in a really great place – multiple subgroups, everyone contributing to the effort, people stepping up and helping the group find direction, facilitating a collaborative process. You had all the signs of a very high functioning group. But what is up on the wiki doesn’t demonstrate any work was done on the assignment beyond that – it was a good start, but still needed work. This wasn’t an in-class writing, there is an expectation that you’ll need to continue to work on your ideas outside of class. You need to use the in-class time to get yourselves on the same page before leaving class to continue to work on your own (or in small teams). Then you need a plan to weave all those individual efforts together to submit the assignment, you need to know WHO are the people to review it before submission to make sure everyone came through on their part. That’s what the communication plan is all about, how to do that.
From the assignment sheet:
Evaluation
Faculty will evaluate the management plan and provide feedback using the following criteria:
The appropriateness of the group members’ allocated roles and responsibilities to the scope and nature of the assignment requirements / I absolutely love the idea of having each member of the group have some specific role related to facilitating the process (as well as the task completion roles you will all have). But to have this work you really need to articulate what those roles would be. You give two examples, but the folks who weren’t in on the discussion your small group had may be at a loss beyond those. You really need to general a longer list, with a brief description of the things that person would do. Not every group will have every role you list, but having a longer list to choose from will help the groups think about their own needs and what roles they would pick.
Additionally, your plan seems to rely on the leadership skills of the group leaders. I’m totally on board with that – but given the wiki page discussion, there are definitely different perspectives on what leaders DO and what is expected of them. I’d really like to see you create a thoughtful list of the things the group leaders should do, so every group leader is crystal clear of what is expected of them. (Some that you mentioned here are: Be prepared to represent the views of any absent members, Communicate with Wendy, being prepared to clearly explain to the larger class what the small group worked on, is planning, etc.).
The thoughtfulness and maturity with which the plan addresses key interaction issues such as accountability, tolerance of dissenting views, civility, acceptable research ethics, etc. / The plan you generated in class is a very good start. But I’d like to have seen you continue to work on it a little more to have some more concrete plans in order to be realistic. Some of your ideas, like hand-raising and reducing interruptions are great, but knowing your group, what is the plan for when people start talking at once? Who’s job is it to reinforce taking turns? If anyone should jump in and remind everyone of the rules, what will compel the others to listen to them? What processes might you use when LOTS of people have something to say and everyone wants to go first?
The clarity and thoroughness of the procedures outlined to guarantee the completion of research tasks / This is a big missing piece – and the lack of much out of class work on this project or progress on the needs/assets assessment demonstrates that it is a really important piece to have figured out.
There is clearly a need for some large group leadership roles – very similar to the roles alluded to in the small group roles description. There needs to be a person who facilitates the process of identifying tasks and assigning them to the small groups, there needs to be a person who follows up with each small group leader to make sure they are on-track with their piece of the project. In class there was discussion about having one person who does the weekly communications with Volunteer Fairfax – all questions for them get filtered through that one person so VF gets one email and not ten. Good idea in class – but not reported here in the plan. Also, you need someone (or a few people) who are the final reviewers of each assignment, making sure everything is well put together (pages link to each other, proofread, double check each other’s work, etc.) before it is submitted. In the case of this plan, Sam clearly took this role. Your plan gives no clue about how that happened. Did you all decide Sam would do that or did she just happen to be responsible enough to take it upon herself and check? If it’s the latter – next time, I wouldn’t leave it to chance that one of you will happen to check.
Important to note: these large group roles do not have to be filled by the same person for every assignment. In fact I think it would be more fair to rotate these roles through-out the semester. Something your plan does not address is how you make sure everyone is contributing and the work isn’t largely done by a small handful of people. How will you keep track of the contributions people are making? If someone never serves as a small group leader for any of these assignments, how will keep track of that to know they should contribute in a large group role to make up for it?
The key to making sure this large group role rotation works though is to make sure make the expectations of the job description clear (i.e. write ‘em down).
General Expectations: Quality of writing and general presentation of ideas. 750 words, integration of any additional material or useful formatting to aid understanding (tables, graphics, links). / Unfortunately, it is this part of the assignment that demonstrates the failing of the Communication Plan itself. There seems to have been no plan for any further work on the assignment outside of class. There is no link to it from the front page – at first I wondered if you’d remembered to turn it in. Then I found the three pages you created during class time and realized, this is “it.” In fact, the wonderful work you did identifying everyone’s strengths so that each small group can have a diverse set of skills in it – a stroke of genius – I was bragging about you to the other faculty…. That page isn’t even linked to in the Communication Plan screen. No one refers to the existence of this list or its purpose. So bummed – its such a sophisticated way to organized yourselves, and you forgot to weave it into the plan!
I would have liked to see the Communication Plan screen have some sort of introductory comments – some overall thoughts about what values are underlying each part of the plan (you do have these – for example, you are focused on making room for everyone to be able to contribute and on utilizing each person’s unique skills – would have loved to see you be observant about that and articulate it to introduce the reader before jumping into the subsections of the plan.