TASK

After the CAPSIM businesss simulation's practice rounds occurred, my team had a better idea of how to navigate through the simulation’s departments, reports, and decisions. Once we had settled into CAPSIM’s functioning, we had to figure out how to organize our efforts and make decisions moving forward. Since I was not in charge of monitoring a department, similar to a Project Manager, I took initiative in helping my team develop a system to plan and organize our work for round one’s decisions.

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MY ACTIONS

Once the official CAPSIM rounds had begun, I decided it was necessary to put communication and organization systems in place so that our team could stay in touch and on track. Since this team-based business simulation is fast-paced, I recognized that it was necessary to meet and communicate frequently. To manage our communication platform, I created a Facebook group for our ARBUS 400 team as well as a group chat for instantaneous messaging. I felt that these platforms were the most suitable for our team since Facebook is easy to use and each of my team members use it regularly. Once my team had decided on a weekly meeting date and time, I searched for study rooms on-campus and online through UW’s library website. Specifically, I looked for rooms with monitors because it would be a good tool to help us visualize our decisions and work through them together. Once I secured a study room, I messaged my team on Facebook, a day prior to our meeting, to let them know in advance where we would be meeting. Once we were at our meeting, I volunteered to take notes because I recognized that documenting our group process would be important in recollecting and justifying our decisions for our upcoming AGM. To take notes, I created a Google drive for our group. I decided to use Google docs because I thought it was a good platform that allowed all of us to equally edit and contribute to any documents. Once the Google drive was created, I notified them of the resource in-person and posted a link to it on our group’s Facebook page (refer to figure 1). During our meeting, I made a separate folder for notes and named each note based on our meeting date to create a chronological record of our discussions (refer to figure 2). While discussing, I ensured to capture any information, findings, and strategies that were key to our decision-making process. Once the meeting was over, we discussed to have department forecasts (e.g. marketing, production) prepared before our next class, which was when round one decisions would be due.

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RESULTS

After my team members created forecasts for their monitored departments, they inputted their information in our shared Google drive. As a result of my initiative in creating an organization system, my team was able to coordinate their work into a collective space. Furthermore, by setting up meetings, creating notes and setting up Facebook communications I helped create a precedent for how we were going to systematically work together. Ultimately, I believe my initiative begun the streamlining the process for which my group will collaborate and make decisions together throughout the remainder of the term.