If you followed this blog for a bit, you might have noticed that I have been participating in group projects in some of my classes since the beginning of my part-time MBA program. So far, I have co-authored two group research papers (Business Ethics and Global Perspectives) and have been doing group assignments in Managerial Accounting and Microeconomics.
I find these group assignments to be a very crucial part of my learning experience. A few most significant benefits/challenges:
- Learning from others, as other students from different backgrounds often have interesting insights. Even if sometimes those insights turn out wrong or irrelevant for the “final answer”, you learn about the potential pitfalls of various approaches.
- Getting to know new classmates in a more personal way which is mostly not possible in a lecture setting.
- Doing the balancing act of reconciling everyone’s schedules and other constraints if the group face to face meeting is necessary.
- The last but not the least – working the group dynamics, with sometimes conflicting interests, and occasional ego bursts, or just people not delivering their share.
This last point is becoming especially obvious in the latest group assignment I am working on in my Managing Human Capital class. The particular challenge of this assignment is that that we have 10 (ten!) people assigned to a relatively small project – four questions to a case study need to be squeezed into 8-10 pages write-up and 20 minutes in-class presentation. The very first challenge was to creatively divvy up the work among all of us, so that everyone had their part to contribute. That we managed to do quite efficiently via online collaboration. However now we will have a bigger challenge to tie all these people with their small chunks of work into one cohesive paper/presentation. We already got one discontent voice about how this is going to work.
By the way, I remember talking last summer, before the start of my own MBA studies, to one of my undergraduate acquaintances who did her MBA in Thunderbird some ten years ago. I was asking all kinds of questions, including the ones about the specific challenges of MBA experience. One of the things she mentioned was that she did not like the group projects. The reason for that was this need for working the group dynamics and also dealing with the “free riders”. She said, often times it would be easier to do the whole thing by herself, than to deal with the group. That was when I decided to avoid this reputation by all means. That’s why I am almost done with my assigned write up section, so I will be free to deal with other issues as they come up. 
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