Team and teamwork

Well, well! Life is going on well on the good earth and everything moving (almost) smoothly forward.
My work load is quite high in this semester. I have three courses and then I am also working 20 hours per week.
For a month and half I was taking a course from MBA program as part of my own program “Reservoir Characterization”.

Dr. Laurie Milton was the instructor of “Optimizing Team Dynamics”. I believe she was very good at this, though she also put a huge amount of load on us. We had lots of reading and writing assignments which almost kept me away from reading any of the other courses.
I was a little bit uncomfortable with the amount of time I spent on this course and maybe most of the course was a sort of common sense. But, looking back after finishing it, I see what has happened. The course has done a couple of good things. Firstly it organized “my understanding” of teamwork or the “common sense”. Also, it gave me some good ideas about what makes team fail. One interesting thing was the concept of team contract. What we did was that we wrote down on hard paper what we want to achieve as objective and how we want to do that. Even, how we are going to interact with each other. Probably the contract couldn’t help alone if somebody just had given it to us. What really made it work was the process of preparing it. The process allowed everyone to openly bring the things that he or she wanted to be there. The other concepts which were useful are appreciation of conflict while keeping it away of getting to interpersonal conflict and also the maybe the importance of openness. All in all, it was a good course, though it made such an impression on me about Fridays that I shiver when I hear the word.
For now I have to do something about my other two courses. Team is good, but I have other stuffs to do too!!!