A larger teams means an expanded vision and being able to pursue more ambitious ideas but it also incurs an overhead – team management. Effectively managing a team and keeping all team members up to date can be stressful and a daunting task. I think one way to approaching management tasks is by asking a few concrete questions:

• What’s the primary channel of communication?
• How often should we be meeting? What are the preparing expectations for a meeting?
• How are we managing our data? What are the expectations about knowledge?
• How are we managing our TODO items?
• How should we resolve conflicts?

Meeting

For the main meeting, every student should be prepared with the following:

• A short weekly update.
• Technical challenges faced during the assigned task.
• Questions or gotchas found during the assigned the task.

At the end of the main meeting, each student should leave with:

• At least one assigned task for the week. This can be a paper to read and explain, feature to implement, or a theorem to prove.
• A good sense of where to look for answers to their questions.

A lot of students (myself included) struggle with prioritizing tasks. Assigned tasks help me focus on a task that I need to get done every week.

TODO List

The todo list should make it easy to create tasks and have discussions around them and also allow team members to see who is working on what.

Conflict resolution

This is an often overlooked dimension of team dynamics. Research projects can often be stressful, especially since students tend to be ambitious and prone to overworking. Since this process so highly dependent on the team members and project leads, my guideline can only be personalized for me.

If a team member feels under too much pressure to do something or dislikes someone’s personal behavior, they can either directly contact the person or ask one of the team leads to mediate. While daunting, it is much better in the long run to have frank discussions about team expectations and stresses instead of letting things get worse.