Team Project

Japan
April 23, 2007 10:46am CST
I'm in 3rd yr engineering and for the whole year, the class is divided into teams to work on a yr long project. Our project this yr is making a robot which follows a black line and picks up coloured tokens. It has to decide which routes to take depending on the colour of the token picked up. In addition, we are to put a novelty feature on our robot as well. My group is unfortunate to have a "leech" assigned to the group. I term him a leech because he hasn't been pulling his weight. We first assigned him to research on programming. He has two months and in the end nothing was done so we gave him the task of doing the voltage regulators which was one of the main circuits that we needed. He took some months to produce a printed circuit board of the circuit. His design could have taken 2 weeks to produce. I had to push him for some results in the end during begining of April to get it done because our project is due at end of April. His task isn't exactly hard. All he needed to do was look up the circuit on the internet and just test it out beforehand to check that it does work. Then he create a printed circuit board. Another pain about him is that instead of just doing the work on his own, he asks every other team member question about his own work. I mean, sure do ask if you got trouble with it. However the way he goes on about it, its like he doesn't want to do any work and instead just asks people for answers that he is able to find if he took some time to look for it. Its not like we know about it either, we have to look it up as well. To add insult, his end product didnt' even work at all. Now I'm stuck with his job in addition to my own work. We have less than one week to go and there are quite a few things that haven't work properly yet. My question to you all is that have you ever been in a situation where you had a "leech" in your group? You end up having to do his share of the work because the rest of the team wants a good grade.
1 response
@bruxedo (773)
• France
23 Apr 07
I'm lucky and always when I worked with a team we could do a good team work, but if I was in that situation I think I would tell him to stay out of the group and would force him to accept in front of the teachers that he hadn't done a proper work and obliged the others to work a lot more than was intended to.
• Japan
23 Apr 07
this is university, you can't force someone to do something. We are not allowed to change team members or anything like that. Once alocated, it is fixed. All I can do is report to the supervisor of our team. I really hope they give him the marks that he rightly deserves.