Captain's Log #4

Written by Zach Mueller

 

In this week's Captain's Log, I'm jumping in again to write a meta-focused Log as the Principal Investigator of the team. As these Logs are intended to bolster future captains in conducting their own scientific endeavors, one aspect of advancing science that often gets overlooked is how to organize and manage teams. Many scientific discoveries today inherently require coordination within and across teams, so knowing how to effectively operate teams of scientists is just as important as knowing how to conduct the science itself. While our context is running a high school iGEM team out of a community lab, many of the things we try in an effort to improve our effectiveness as a team is applicable to groups of scientists broadly.

Team Organization

Given our team’s size this year (nearly 50 people in total), we have distinct roles in place to help clarify responsibilities: Team Members, Student Leads, and Advisors. Additionally, once we shifted focus from the brainstorming/research phase into the execution phase, each person is now formally designated as primarily supporting one of four subteams: Wetlab, Hardware, Software, and Public Relations. Creating this formal assignment of each person to a subteam came about in discussions among Leads and Advisors after noticing Team Members were lacking direction, having come back together as one large team after working more effectively while researching four separate potential projects as ad hoc subteams.

Leads and Advisors picked their subteams based on their strengths and interests. A Google Form was created to solicit preferences among the rest of the team for where they would prefer to focus their time this season. All members were placed within their first or second subteam choice and all are encouraged to join other subteams as Secondary members. Members are held accountable for sufficiently contributing to their Primary subteam, but are able to extend their learning experience by additionally supporting other subteams. This subteam structure provides clarity for everyone involved to know what their main focus should be and whom they should be taking direction from.

Each subteam has one or two Student Leads that manage the Team Members on the subteam to execute tasks needed to move the project forward. Students who become Leads are those who show strong commitment to the team as well as exhibit leadership potential. Leads are responsible for ensuring their subteam achieves their goals for the iGEM competition, though they may look to their subteam’s Advisor as needed for support and guidance. We are fortunate that each of our four Advisors are professionals with expertise in the areas in which they are advising. Even without that expertise, this structure again drives clarity of direction by ensuring it comes from one person. To reinforce this, Leads are explicitly told to listen to the direction provided by their subteam’s Advisor over any conflicting idea I might personally present, which is a bad habit of mine.

My role as Principal Investigator is to ensure the right structure is in place to enable the team to succeed in the iGEM competition while, more importantly, ensuring everyone involved is learning and finds the endeavor enjoyable. I also provide general support, guidance, and teaching when requested by any of the Advisors, Leads, or Team Members. During times when any Advisor is out or particularly busy, I temporarily take on their role to provide guidance to their subteam’s Leads while they are away.

Team Operations

One norm we set into place early this iGEM season is the practice of writing brief documents, via Google Drive, that detail important structure, rules, and best practices for our team to follow. The first document detailed the Weekly Review process, wherein each student is required to write a summary every week of their contributions to the team and submit it to the Advisors. This has served well for filtering down our members to only those students who are truly committed to iGEM while also being a mechanism through which students may ask questions or even propose valuable ideas for how we can improve as a team. Weekly Reviews have also been valuable to identify areas where we, as Advisors, need to improve or when situations arise that need extra attention.

The Three Strikes Rule is an enforcement mechanism for Advisors to additionally ensure only students committed to iGEM are allowed to continue on the team. Given the constraints on Advisors’ time and the intense nature of iGEM, we prioritize providing this experience to students who are willing to put in the effort to learn and to contribute. In contrast to those successful implementations, our use of Todoist as a Task Manager thus far has not been as effective across the full team. While its use has improved in recent weeks, I still need to provide better coaching to the team on how to leverage the tool.

Next Areas of Focus

We are continuously iterating on the way we structure and operate the team, so a few specific areas are top-of-mind among Leads and Advisors for what to improve next. We are imminently announcing new documents related to managing scheduling within the team, given the challenges of distributed meeting planning that enables Leads to plan for their separate subteams among the limited resources and the varying availabilities of their Team Members. For tracking our experiments in lab notebooks, we primarily use an online tool, Benchling, but are still exploring how to keep everything organized. Additionally, a new recurring piece of written content is on its way, the Internal Progress Report, as a means of keeping everyone updated on progress across subteams now that students are spending most of their iGEM time focusing within one or two subteams.