Reflection: Teamwork Practices

Working with Anja on this project was a good decision as we produced a motion graphic of a high standard.

We delegated roles where I would create the illustrations for our motion graphic and Anja would put this together in After Effects. This worked well due to my previous experience using Adobe Illustrator in my part-time employment and previously taking a short course in this software in 2017. Anja had practised using Unity during the summer and therefore thought he may be more familiar with moving assets and coding in this environment if necessary. In future, we could have improved this arrangement by learning about Adobe After Effects prior to starting the project by using video tutorials/online courses to learn this software. This would have meant having fewer problems with transitions, completing the project faster and meant that we could have included more complex animations/transitions.

Anja and I communicated using Slack and face-to-face communication. We discussed when we were free to meet prior to starting the project. This was effective as we used Slack to discuss our ideas and brainstorm while working together face-to-face when creating our motion graphic. This meant that we were able to immediately ask each other questions about the project, give feedback on illustrations and were able to agree and compromise scene transitioning in After Effects. Using Slack to collaborate is a beneficial tool according to James Sanders (2018), "In the information economy, sorting through internal discussions in an organization can be a laborious task, particularly when discussions are conducted through long chains of emails. The goal of the cloud-based team collaboration tool Slack is to simplify internal communication in order to increase efficiency." I agree with Sanders because when using Slack during our project, I discovered that you could create different channels, which meant that specific discussions could be kept separate from other topics. If we were communicating only via e-mail the long threads would have made communicating a challenge. For example, if the topic of conversation had changed and we needed to view a previous discussion, you would have to search to find the previous conversation. Communicating is more efficient in Slack as it is a messaging application that you can easily access anywhere. Unfortunately, we discovered that you need to have Slack running in the background on your computer or mobile device otherwise you wouldn't receive notifications. This was discovered because I realised that Anja wasn't responding to messages, therefore, I would message him on WhatsApp to open Slack as he didn't receive a notification.

In future projects, I will continue to use Slack and ensure that my partner has the application constantly running so that we can work as efficiently as possible. Furthermore, integrating more platforms such as Google Drive to store artwork files would be beneficial as we didn't really have a channel for sending files. Therefore by storing these files in a drive would mean that your partner could access all files at once. We attempted to use Trello integrated with Slack however, it wasn't as successful as we hoped. It needed to be monitored and managed frequently so that new tasks could be added and set to completed. This integration would be more useful for a larger team working project with more members and on a larger scale however as we were in direct communication with each other it wasn't really necessary to use this as well as Slack. Therefore in future, I will re-evaluate the most beneficial way of communicating for every teamwork project I am involved in, as every group dynamic would have different requirements.

Furthermore meeting in person was ideal in completing this project successfully. Launch Workplaces (2018) stated, "If your clients and/or your employees don’t feel connected, it can be hard to understand the needs of one another. While digital communication may seem quick and convenient, face-to-face communication is still the most productive and powerful way to achieve your goals." As Anja and I communicated both digitally and face-to-face, I understand and agree with Launch Workplaces as explaining every problem via messaging may become difficult as that person may not be able to explain their problem coherently. Working together in the same place allows you to quickly look at a problem and solve it without much explanation. The method we used to communicate meant that we could finish our project within the deadline to Ocado's requirements and therefore I would use this way of communicating again in future projects.

Although we organised to meet in person and communicated via Slack, Anja had planned to go home at the end of the week and therefore we potentially missed three days where we could have worked on our motion graphic. Therefore in future, re-arranging these type of events may have been an optimal decision as this would have meant that we could have finalised specific parts of our ad, lessened some stress and prepared more for our presentation with this extra time.

Our presentation went well however the feedback received mentioned that we appeared slightly awkward when presenting. This may have been due to many factors, as we were the first group to present. Prior to the presentation, we thought that we had the choice of presenting using our own laptops or the projector, however, Ocado's design team requested that we use the projector which may have caused us to feel unprepared. To avoid this in future, transferring our presentation onto either a USB or the computer connected to the projector beforehand would be a better option in case we cannot present in the way we intended to. Another factor may have been due to the short amount of preparation time before the presentation. We only had an hour to decide what information we were going to convey to Ocado and delegate who was going to speak each part. Therefore to eliminate this in future and feel more prepared, we could set aside more preparation time for our presentation and practice presenting to ourselves or a smaller audience beforehand.

From the feedback Ocado gave us, they mentioned that we delivered our story well however we were missing the emotional connection that other ads have. Emotional marketing is an important factor in advertisements. Ivy Cohen (2017) agrees with this in her article stating, "Emotional marketing tells a story that connects with an audience in a human or personal way. With consumers increasingly making buying decisions driven by feelings rather than logic, emotional marketing creates meaningful relationships that result in brand fans, replacing the loyalty marketing approach of years past." Therefore due to these reasons, it would be beneficial in future to test our motion graphic ad on our target audience as this would help us detect these problems earlier on. This would allow us time to change certain aspects to successfully convey these emotions in our ad.

Bibliography

COHEN, I (2017). 5 Ways to Get to the Heart of Emotional Marketing. [Online] July 25th 2017. Available from: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/297367. [Accessed: 7th December 2018].

LAUNCH WORKPLACES (2018). Why is Face-to-Face Communication in the Workplace Important?. [Online] Available at: https://launchworkplaces.com/why-is-face-to-face-communication-in-the-workplace-important/ [Accessed: 6 December 2018]

SANDERS, J. (2018) Slack: A cheat sheet. [Online] November 1st 2018. Available from: techrepublic.com https://www.techrepublic.com/article/slack-the-smart-persons-guide/. [Accessed: 6th December 2018].