I mostly took this week up with working on a Group Project. Working in a group project is never particularly fun, and unfortunately, 15% of this degree is group projects. I have horrid memories of the one group project I did in my undergraduate degree. One guy never showed up and any work he provided was awful. Most of my members struggled with writing and I ended up debating with a professor during our presentation - stress doesn't come close to describing it.
This group project was to put together an “academic poster” on a topic. The purpose of a poster like this is usually at academic conferences. A bunch of scientists and researchers all stand in a room with their posters with their research on them and they give a presentation to people walking around.
They usually look something like this:



Not exactly the most eye-catching thing I’ve ever seen! I mean, can you even read the text? Thankfully, we don’t need to do the standing around in a room, but we have the challenge of creating a poster like this and trying to make it even better.

Here are the steps we took to get this Group Project done.

1. Getting in Contact

They assigned us our groups at the beginning of the module and I nervously waited to see if anyone would get in contact.
They didn’t.
So as the deadline loomed, I donned my Business Analyst hat and got to sending around some emails. What sort of accidentally happened is I became the project manager. I organised the meetings, where we put all our files, how we edited, delegating actions, sending follow up emails to the meetings. At first, this annoyed me slightly, but I quickly got over it. I was just happy I didn’t need to do any of the design work!

2. Choosing a Topic

I was nervous about topic choosing, as there are a few topics I’d rather not talk about because I find it boring or I understand it a lot less than others. The assignment description was pretty vague. It basically said we can choose any topic covered in the module so far.
Initial suggestions hinted towards something blockchain-related and I immediately wanted nothing to do with that! Plus, it’s a little obvious and not the most interesting topic to delve deep into. In the end, I sneakily brought up that Artificial Intelligence is where my strength lies and thankfully the topic shifted. However, the people in my group turn out to be very interested in cybersecurity so we ended up with ‘Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity’. Could have been a lot worse but also a lot better. We discovered that one of our group members is a whizz with Photoshop so thankfully we didn’t have to worry too much about the design, he’d be able to whip something up.

3. Setting up our Workspace

I discovered quickly that no one had ever used any collaboration software before, the software where you can both edit it from different computers at exactly the same time. Luckily, there is one I’ve used so much in my professional experience and that is Google Drive and Google Docs.
If you’ve never used it before, it’s quite cool in that as you type, someone else can see what you’re typing and even jump in with their own edits. It’s perfect for working on something together and save you from sending emails back and forth to each other.
Once our design group member put together initial designs, I made a “collaborate” version where we could edit the text and he could easily copy and paste it into the design after. This was so we could easily see if we had written too much or needed to tweak something, etc.

Above is the design version of the poster

Above is the collab version of the poster

This was perfect because it meant we didn’t have to send revisions constantly to the person with the main design file, and we could edit in real-time whilst on a video call and tweak and add additions in our own time in between meetings.

4. Writing my Section

The last steps of planning were to delegate who got which section. We split our poster into five sections:

• Introduction
• Current Research
• Industry Examples
• Ethics
• Conclusion

1. Writing a section on ethics is extremely difficult when you do not know what anyone else is writing. I found I could only write once the others had turned in their sections, which was not long before our next discussion meeting. In the end, I put together a couple of suggested reasons but knew I wouldn’t be able to hammer them out without knowing what they had written.
2. This section is really what drives the entire poster - what are we trying to say when showing this research and examples? I realised I had accidentally tasked myself with deciding our opinion on how we use artificial intelligence for cybersecurity.

I noted quickly that we needed to create some kind of story with the poster, and I went through everyone’s sections and started narrowing them down. I found that there was a common thread in anomaly detection and proposed we made our topic more granular and focused on that. We initially said we would write the conclusion together, but I noticed quickly that it would be quicker and more effective if I took this responsibility too as it links heavily to the ethics section. Thankfully, the group agreed with all of this, so I had no trouble steering us in what I thought was the best direction.

5. Editing

I also took it upon myself to be the editor of the entire poster. It is really important when collaboratively writing that things such as references, spelling, and acronyms are as consistent as possible, as well as providing a consistent writing voice. I made sure all references had the same format and we defined any acronyms used in previous sections.
I also spent a painstaking evening making our “designer” do a lot of tweaks to make everything look good. For each revision I would add about 15 comments and then at one point I had to step by step the changes. Thankfully, he said he was used to this kind of thing and not to worry, but I felt bad!
At one point though, another group member insisted we feed all our writing into a program called “Grammarly”, as it “does it all for you”. This is true, software such as Grammarly can be really useful for spell checking, and it even gives suggestions about sentence structure and voice. I’ll be honest, I do use tools like Grammarly to help with editing, but I think over-reliance on it can lead to missing issues you may have picked up on by reading it better.
After our last meeting where we did this, we said the writing was ready. The designer said he would finish it the next day, where we would all view it one more time and submit it. Now call me crazy...call me controlling...but in between this time, I sneakily went in and edited it all again. I didn’t think I could go to bed until I had read everything repeatedly and as I mentioned earlier - having one voice across the writing is very important and I wanted to make sure this happened. I’m happy I made this decision. I found a few extra errors that were minor but I think made a vast difference.

6. Submission

You may have noticed that I haven’t discussed the subject at all, just creating it. Well, the simple answer to this is what better way to learn about our subject than reading our final poster! Here it is... try not to fall asleep too much!

Link to poster here.
 

Final Thoughts

I don’t think we will get the highest of marks. I think our poster lacks more visuals and is a lot of writing. However, I think given the group scenario; we managed the best we could to produce a genuinely collaborative piece. I was quite lucky with my group members; no one skipped any meetings, and they tried to be as flexible as possible. It ended up feeling like quite an enormous achievement by the end. We only gave ourselves just over a week to get everything done and submitted, so to go from nothing to a proper substantial piece of work was really fun.
I wish I could say I will look forward to the other group projects down the line - but unfortunately, I do not. I much prefer working alone. However, I’ve learned that it may not be as bad as I may initially imagine.