Blog #2: Reflection on CS2103T Project - Communication

We have all identified that communication between members in a group or an organisation is essential to get work done effectively; thus, likewise for our group, we feel that communication, especially in the form of physical meetings are important if we want to be able to deliver a good presentation, project proposal, etc. However, having physical meetings is unfortunately not something we can do often due to the lack of free time among us and the vast distance that some of us have to travel to NUS, being one of the challenges we face as a group.

Apart from this twin module of CS2101 and CS2103T, each of us in the group have almost no modules in common, hence our timetable is very different for the individual. This poses a problem as there will be very little common time among the group members and it makes it very hard for us to have physical group meetings during the weekdays. For the weekends, each of us have our own individual commitment, for example, assignments from schools, for some of us, having to catch up with the lessons being taught in school, having to spend time with family and so on. Also, having physical meetings outside of school during the weekends is not very feasible and some of us are living in the eastern side of Singapore, having to travel a huge distance before reaching NUS, wasting 2 – 3 hours of our time just on travelling.

We have a solution for this however, and that is to have online meetings. The benefit about having online meetings is that there’s no need for anyone to travel, which means precious time will not be wasted. Also, due to the advancement in technology and availability of work sharing programs, online meetings can be a good substitute to physical meetings. Since we are not able to have much physical meetings, this is our common form of communication. For the creation of our project proposal, we had used online meetings extensively for our discussion. Prior to the online meetings, we had a small physical meeting in school due to the free time we had during the CS2101 class. From there we discussed about the workload division and we went back to do our individual parts.

Meeting online may seem like a good solution to physical meetings, but we soon realise that it is not as effective. Unlike physical meetings, there tend to be less effective communication between us as there is a lack of body communication, which has actually a huge percentage in effective communication. It’s harder to express our opinions on something, as it is quite hard to convince others through online rather than face-to-face. For example, when having an opinion about the design of the project, it is easier to physically explain to everyone on why you believe that this is better than another, and you can also draw out a visual presentation of what you are trying to explain. This is actually quite hard to do it online. There’s also another problem in having only one person talking at one time. During physical meetings, when someone talks, usually everybody else would just listen and concentrate on interpreting and understand what that is person is saying, however, we can see that during our online discussions, due to the lack of physical cues, we tend to be voicing our opinions and ideas at the same time, and sometimes, some of these ideas get pushed up and eventually ignored.

On top of online meetings, we sometimes discuss through emails and the benefit of this is that we do not have to be online at the same time. But this too poses another problem, and that is sometimes overlooking the email, or not reading the email because you didn’t know it was sent. We have our own solution to this though, and that is to notify each other through SMS after the sending of an email. Everyone of us tend to be beside our phone 24/7 and this serves as a good notification to tell each other than an email has been sent.

In conclusion, the challenge I have identified for our group is communication, and I mentioned about how important physical meetings are, and the solutions we have for it, that being online meetings and emails. Although online meetings and emails are not the best replacements for physical meetings, it definitely helps us to tackle the problem of communication among us and we strive to make our online meetings more effective, possibly through waiting for each other to voice our that opinions and ideas individual without any interruptions and so on.