Working With Others

Question 1

When will you give and receive feedback?

Answer 1

When you produce something:
- Document
- Code
- Design
- Ideas
- Test results

Question 1

What different levels of team engagement are you likely to experience? Give 2.

Answer 1

• Deliberately not taking part
• Finding it difficult to take part (nervous)
• Taking part too much, dominating

Question 2

What are the importance of giving feedback on your documents? Give 4.

Answer 2

• Unseen Aspects get recorded
• Ambiguous language gets tightened
  Stakeholders get a sense of influence and ownership
• Utilize the knowledge and brainpower of more people
  Get other perspectives
  Ensure that your perspectives are communicated
• Prevent Aspect of designs being incoherent or redundant
• Force design issues to be aired before the expense and emotional commitments when designs and build progrsses

Question 3

What are some downsides to soliciting feedback? Give 4.

Answer 3

• It slows you down to get feedback
• You have additional tasks to reconcile perspectives and give disposition
• It dilutes your original ideas
• It reduces your sense of ownership of the solution
  You may not agree with everyone else’s opinion
• It is something that makes you vulnerable, so you must get yourself emotionally equipped to solicit and process feedback

Question 4

What are some ways to communication?

Answer 4

• Online meetings
• Document sharing
• Chats/Messaging

Question 5

What are the tools to facilitate communication within a team?

Answer 5

• Microsoft Teams
• Google Meetup
• Other work management systems
• Word
• Google docs
• Atom with git
• Acrobat
• Dropbox

Question 6

Give some Synchronous ways of giving feedback

Answer 6

• Face to face meetings
• Telephone calls (no video)
• Conference calls (with shared screen)

Question 7

Give an Asynchronous way of giving feedback

Answer 7

• Document Review (share a document, then review, and send back)

Question 8

How to give positive feedback? Give 4.

Answer 8

• Focus on the document/content rather than the author/person
  i.e. “You write really bad sentences” vs “These sentences need to be rewritten”
• Be specific, avoid general comments that may be of limited use.
• Give examples to illustrate the feedback made. Allows the user to decide what to do with your feedback.
• Be realistic. Feedback should focus on what can be changed, it’s useless and frustrating to get feedback on something out of their control.
• Distinguish between your opinion and group opinion. I.e. “We think this should be..” vs “I think that this should be…”
• Be timely.

Question 9

How to receive and review feedback? Give 2.

Answer 9

• Be open. This means being receptive to new ideas and different opinions. There’s often more than way of doing something. You may learn something from others.
• Understand the message. Make sure you understand what is being said, especially before responding to the feedback.
• Ask questions for clarification if necessary.

Question 10

How can we keep track of versions and reasons for changes?

Answer 10

• Document control
• Within document versioning

Question 11

Why is feedback sometimes less than professional? Give 3

Answer 11

• People use it as a mechanism to establish position
• It may be advantageous to them or their organization to slow your design
• They have not actually read the design but need to “show up”
• People mostly need to say something about your work, otherwise it looks like they haven’t reviewed it.
• Beware of the empty review comment that turns into a monster for you to address.