When approaching the idea of group work, the biggest decision is always, who to work with? who can you bare to spend hours in the library with? who are you going to be able to have creative arguments with? Fortunately when we began choosing groups for the particular project i’m going to discuss, we had a helping hand in the form of the Belbin Test.
The Belbin test is a personality test. It works by giving numerical values to the answers of a number of questions, using the values to work out which are the strongest two categories and these equate to personality types, I came out as a really strong Team worker and secondly a Co-ordinator which seems about right most of the time, however I do think I have a little bit of Shaper in me when necessary!
Right so, back to choosing the group, Rhi, Florence and Kayleigh are friends of mine and we know we work well together from doing seminar work and late night library sessions before our exams! All 3 of the girls are also Teamworkers, hopefully this will mean we will all work well together and make decisions rationally. Florence is also a Co-ordinator so we are very similar in our group personalities, Rhi is a Completer-Finisher which is really handy for tidying up the last bits of our project and keeping us all on track! Kayleigh is also a Plant, so we’re all hoping for her genius to set our work apart from the rest!!
I definitely think using something like the Belbin test helps to analyse personalities and also works really well as an ice-breaker in new situations, but it is important to remember that these are just 'typical' characteristics and everybody works differently in reality. I am really looking forward to working with this group of people.
Right so the group is sorted, now we're ready for our brief!
Our brief says we are an online fashion company, this has me hooked as I absolutely love the fashion industry and working in fashion is definitely an aspiration of mine. We have to launch our fashion label into high street stores, and want to do so with the help of a creative agency. We are mostly concerned with chemistry between ourselves and the agency, we want people that we can work with and bounce ideas off of each other, and we want to be heavily involved in the creative planning... not too much to ask then, hopefully we won’t scare them off!
In lectures and seminars we have discussed the advantages of bringing in an outside agency for certain PR activities, for something like this, I definitely think it would be useful to bring in an outside agency to work alongside our in-house team. As it is such a big task it would be important to have an agency that had previous experience in this type of launch, and simply to have an extra few pairs of hands to help with the work load. Many organisations employ outside agencies when taking on large PR campaigns.
In our first group meeting we looked at some ideas for our brief and the message that we want to get across. We made a rough plan of how we are going to structure our brief and we booked time in the diary for the next meeting to finalise our ideas ... So watch this space.
