Subject: Team Charter – SMI Innovations (Team name could still change) (Team #1)
Course Title: BUS477
Instructor: Ean Jackson
Team Members: Chris Snow (BUS477), Scott Mackay(BUS477), Mike Tyson (ENSC201), Jason Cheung (ENSC201), Brandan Fairs (ENSC201)
Team Member Skill Inventory
The area which will require most of Chris’ skill is in his role of Team Leader. He has excellent organizational skills, which will be used to help the group maintain our sense of urgency on this project. He will be responsible for organizing our meetings and workload, as well as assigning internal deadlines for aspects of our project. Chris also has a background in the Finance Concentration, and therefore will be in charge of financial analysis and creating our companies financial statements.
Scott comes from a Marketing Concentration and his main role will be to determine the target markets and customers for our product. He has very strong research skills which will be heavily relied upon.
Mike has unparalleled capabilities with programs such as Excel, Word and Powerpoint. He will be in charge of creating our presentations and editing our reports.
Jason is a very strong writer and will be responsible for polishing our reports. His main task will be to ensure the professionalism of every aspect of our deliverables. Jason will also be serving as the Student/Instructor Liason and will be working to establish a strong rapport with the Instructors.
Brandan will be fulfilling the role of team secretary. The main tasks involved will be taking notes at our meetings and forwarding these notes onto teammates. If any team members are unable to attend a meeting it will be his responsibility to update that team member of upcoming work as well as what occurred at the meeting. Brandan is a very meticulous note-taker and has strong organizational skills.
Learning Team Goals
- Every Team Member in our team receives an A on all of our Team projects/worksheets.
- To be selected as a team to compete in the Ken Spencer finals and win the top prize.
- Every Team Member will complete his required work within our internally assigned deadlines.
- Every Team Member will attend all the meetings. Our goal is 100% attendance. If a Team Member is unable to attend they must inform Chris no later than 24 hours before the meeting.
Potential Obstacles
The barriers we may have in accomplishing what we design to accomplish are the following:
- Scheduling: We anticipate this will be our most difficult obstacle. We recognize that every group member has a very different schedule and that all of us have to be able to balance our other classes and work with the assignments in BUS 477. In order to overcome this obstacle we will be setting weekly deadlines for what should have accomplished, allowing individuals members to accomplish what they need to in advance.
- Geographic Barriers: Every member lives in a different location which makes it difficult to meet up very often. Our plan is to communicate via email, MSN and with weekly meetings at the Burnaby Campus to ensure that every member is progressing with the project and on the same page.
- Communication: One of the issues in every group project is that not everyone does work at the same time, so a group member may be kept waiting for a few days while awaiting replies from another group member. To accommodate this we have exchanged phone numbers so that if anything urgent arises we can instantly have access to other group members.
Ground Rules:
- We have agreed to meet at Tim Horton’s every Thursday for an hour starting at 1:30. For those that cannot be there, they will be responsible for sending a group member all the work they have done during the week and notified after the meeting of all new developments via email. Our team will also be emailing throughout the week to update group members as we finish specific tasks. We will also be holding a two hour meeting the day before the last day of class.
- Internal deadlines that have been set by the team will be posted in our weekly Team update and through a group email and will generally fall on Mondays. If parts are not completed and we are not able to get in contact with that individual then the team leader will appoint backups to accomplish the task needed.
- If a team member is going to be late or leave early, he or she needs to let the team know. The preferred avenue for doing this will be to inform our Team Leader, Chris, a minimum of 24 hours before the meeting. Our meetings will follow a predetermined agenda that will be communicated via email by Brandan before our meeting. Brandan will also summarize the conclusion of our meeting and will email it along with the minutes of the meeting to all team members.
- Our Team Leader will have the responsibility of ensuring that every group member has a chance to speak. Part of how we will ensure this is by having group members email Brandan if they have a subject that they want discussed. It is also Chris’ responsibility to make sure that everyone stays on track of where the meeting should be going.
- In a group this large that we remember to respect the person that is speaking. In general, this means simply listening to the person and engaging in constructive criticism only. We will avoid interrupting the person speaking, if someone has something to say in response to someone while they are speaking he will raise his hand and Chris will mediate.
- We will set firm deadlines a minimum of one week in advance as well as providing a soft deadlines of what we anticipate being due the next week.
In any situation where there is a disagreement, both sides will be given an equal amount of time to outline their point of view and then we will hold a vote with the majority ruling.
Conflict Management
In general, we believe that we will not experience any real conflicts between team members. However, if there is a problem with a team member we anticipate that this template will provide an appropriate response:
- Be accommodating and flexible with team members, diplomatically remind them of what the group had agreed upon.
- Be flexible and understanding in our approach to collaboration.
- We confront the team member privately, having our team leader do the confronting. We will avoid using any “bullying” tactics.
- We ask our instructor to get involved.
- As a last resort, we ask our Team member to resign from the team or we will forcibly dismiss them from the Team.
Team Members: Chris Snow (BUS477), Scott Mackay(BUS477), Mike Tyson (ENSC201), Jason Cheung (ENSC201), Brandan Fairs (ENSC201)
Meeting time/location: We met in person at Tim Hortons SFU Burnaby at 1:30pm on September 24.
Minutes:
1.) Reviewed elevator pitch (10mins)
2.) Review company valuation (15 mins)
6.) Designate people to review/read Business Plans in WMX room (10 mins)
7.) Scott to review Team Charter, Team to adjust as necessary (15 mins)
Resolved/ToDo:
- Agreed to meet on Thursday, October 1, at 1:30pm in front of Tim Hortons to discuss target markets and WCB possibilities.
- Chris to determine initial valuation
- Jason and Mike to go read/review the previous business plans on Tuesday, September 29
