8.1 Managing staff input

Group projects are often of such a scale that several members of staff need to be involved in supporting students doing the project. Members of staff need to give consistent advice (in terms of content and amount) to all teams.

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This bundle mitigates potential differences in the input that different staff can provide to different groups of students.

The way it works is that, rather than allocate members of staff to individual groups, they are allocated by functional role (for example, one to deal with requirements specification issues, another with implementation and another with testing; or in a multi-disciplinary project, one to act as finance director, another as technical director, and so on). Student interaction with staff is by e-mail only, and by their role, not as individuals, making it easier for individual members of staff to give consistent advice across a single functional area.

It works better if you have available staff with appropriate functional skills, but it can also help use staff who lack the breadth of skills to advise a group throughout the complete project lifecycle.

It doesn't work if students would really benefit from the physical presence of a member of staff in the laboratory (for example, because very detailed instructions need to be given), though staff can be briefed to tell students to ask detailed questions via the e-mail system.

See also: 5.4 Supervisor's Eyes and Ears and 5.3 The help they've had along the way

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So: give careful consideration to which staff are to be deployed in managing group projects, and how that deployment might be most effective.