English 420Y - Business Writing Online

I can tell from what has been going on this week that this is going to be quite an experience. It's really obvious that my group will have a lot of difficulties since 2 of my group members are working full time and the other two are in South America. We have been trying all week to communicate in an effective way but it’s been hard. For the Gantt chart that we have to submit today, it has been really hard to do together, but I am sure that organization will improve after this.

I believe that i managed to do the best I could to get the assignments accomplished this week. I sent an email out when we were assigned groups and introduced myself. I then began sending out a few email this week to try to get things moving and start dividing up duties. I did not get much response from my group so began to work on the gantt chart by myself. Luckily i heard from Roy and got a rough draft from him . I combined the both or ours and posted our groups gantt chart.

This is the Gantt chart Melissa Wood sent us all through an email. I think we should write each other periodically to plan ahead in order to meet all the deadlines set in the chart.

Our gantt chart is attached as an excel document

I accomplished all the goals of the group for Week 5. I designed and created the Gantt Chart and initiated all the group discussion. The day that I received the names of my group members, I immediately sent out an email to introduce myself and get the project started. I provided everyone with my contact information (cell phone, email, and AIM screename) so that I can be contacted at any time. I asked everyone else to provide the same information when they replied, but only received some contact information from one other member.

Considering this was our groups first week together, it took us a while to get going. We started off emailing each other about who we were and really trying to give each person in our 4 person group a feel for who we are and how we work. It was very neat to see the diversity we have in our group and how far away our message are traveling just to get this project done. Matt seemed to be a very outgoing senior and wanted to be the leader, which turns out to be great because our first step, the Gnatt Chart, is due today.

This week has been a learning experience on how to work in groups online. It has been difficult to stay in touch with everyone on a consistent basis. This is mainly due to conflicting schedules and group members communicating from different time zones. I started the week by writing an email to introduce myself and throw out a few ideas on splitting up the work load. As the week has progressed we have gotten better at communicating through email and have made good use of the wiki page. The only problem I have seen is, we have not set up any exact times for group meetings.

This week I contributed to my group significantly. I was the first person to send out an e-mail to the group to get the details on the best time for them to meet online in the provided chat space, or on Instant Messenger. In my e-mail, I asked that each member provide their AOL Instant Messenger screen name, the time they could most conveniently work on things, and their time zone so we could figure out the specific time frame for each person. I also assigned partners for different parts of the project.

I think that the work has been good till now. I guess i will have to rearrange my schedule as I am presently in India, and I am way behind in the time zone. But il try to work according to the american time so that there is no communication problems and the matters could be deiscussed and sorted immidiately. Alex created a gantt chat which I compared with other examples and think it looks good. I think that the task of reading response, for which we had to find a brochure will help in the next week in figuring out the pattern and various other related details.

I have attached Group 2's Gantt Chart.