Over the course of the 10 months that we worked on this project, not everything went smoothly. We met with several obstacles, some major, some minor, but each obstacle, nonetheless, was a learning experience on how to deal with the challenges of being part of a global working team. We have listed a few of them here with explanation of how we overcame them.

Multiple time zones:
This made it very challenging for us to be online at the same time. For example, when the team members in the USA were asleep, the team members in Australia and India were awake and vice versa. We tried to stay up later than usual or wake up earlier than normal occasionally but posting messages on forum and e-mailing turned out to be the best option. This way we posted and responded at times convenient for each one of us.

Language difference:
Our team was comprised of members from different countries. For the most part we were all fluent in English except for our friend and team mate Facundo from Argentina. Facundo communicated in Spanish and Dylan’s sister Ammu, who is fluent in Spanish, helped with the communication between Facundo and the rest of the team. In this way, we overcame the language barrier and also managed to learn some Spanish!

Weather:
There was a two week period during which we lost touch with our primary coach. A terrible storm had affected the area where she lives and she did not have access to the Internet. This was nerve wracking for us at first, because we were unaware of what had happened to her and did not know whom to turn to with questions on the project. Luckily our assistant coach stepped in to help us and so did our parents. We were sure happy when our coach finally got back in touch with us after two weeks.

Power:
This was a major problem for both Simran and Heeral. Both of them live in India, and they lost power quite frequently, sometime four hours daily, sometimes at a stretch, sometimes intermittently. It was challenging for Simran to balance school work and this project. This was also frustrating initially for Dylan when he would be waiting online to discuss the project with Simran and Heeral and they wouldn’t be online because of the loss of power on their end. The team got over this challenge through patience, perseverance and understanding.

Slow connection speed:
Transferring files from the US to Simran in India was a huge issue initially. Some of the files were so big that sending it to her by e-mail was extremely difficult even when zipped. We then found a more convenient way to transfer files by uploading them to yousendit.com.

Illnesses
This was another problem that plagued all team members at some point or the other. At times, some team members could not meet the deadlines as they were sick. It was unavoidable and kept happening throughout the course of the project. In order to keep the project from slipping, the other team members picked up the slack. In this way we shared the workload, helped each other out and made our coaches very proud of us!

Note: Images used in this page are free images retrieved from Microsoft Clipart Gallery.