How do I form project teams within my course?

• Clearly communicate the rationale behind the team formation strategy. This helps students to see the value in the approach and prepares them for the potential challenges they may face.  
• Avoid modifying the teams after the work has started. This stability allows teams to progress through the natural stages of team development — forming, storming, norming, and performing — without the disruption of adjusting to new members. 

• For non-multidisciplinary courses and courses at the start of one’s studies, random assignment is very quick and effective.  
• For multidisciplinary projects, student-selected teams tend to work well, especially if complemented with  
• For projects where topics come from external organizations (like companies), skills-based assignment can help to ensure that the team has the best possible competences to match the needs of the project topics.  

Random assignment 

In this approach, teams are formed randomly. It is a quick and efficient method to use. Random assignment allows team formation to happen even before the course starts as soon as all the participants are known and requires no input from your students. There are many ways to do random assignment in practice, like doing a count-off ¹at the first lecture or utilizing the rand()-formula with excel if you want to form teams outside the lecture situation.  

How to motivate use of this method to students 

• You’re more likely to get know new people, which increases one’s network and sharpens social skills 
• Mimics the real-world, as you seldom have control of who you end up working with.  

Potential challenges and how to avoid them: 

• Random assignment is not particularly suitable when trying to form multidisciplinary teams. If that is the goal, this approach should be avoided, or complemented with  
• Random assignment can lead to imbalances in terms of motivation and skills between teams. These issues can be mitigated by providing explicit opportunities for teams to discuss their goals (inc. grade, allocated worktime etc.) at the start of the project, since simple awareness of differences tends to help in these situations. Further one can also try to follow a bit more closely the progress of those team with less strong skills in the beginning of the course and provide support if needed.  

Suitable especially if: 

• Your course is at early phase of studies, since it fosters students getting to know new peers 
• You want teams to start working before the first actual lecture, since you can form the teams as soon as you know all the participants.  
• You want a quick and simple method.  

Skills – and personality-based assignment 

In this approach, student teams are formed based on students’ skills and personality. Based on the knowledge of each students profile, teacher assigns students in teams with the idea of each team having a suitable balance of required skills and personalities that fits the project at hand. For this approach to work, it is essential that the teacher has required additional information about the students, for example a motivation letter, CV, study records or Myers-Briggs type test results.   

How to motivate use of this method to students 

• Having the right set of skills and personalitites in team increases the likelihood of good results 
• This allows you to learn from peers with different types of perspectives, problem-solving approaches and expertise.  

Potential challenges and how to avoid them: 

• Students need to submit additional information and teachers need to process it which can be cumbersome. If you follow this approach, reserve enough time for it.  
• Students might question the accuracy and relevance of especially personality tests. Easiest way to combat this is to use several data points, like doing team formation not only based on personality, but also skills.  

Suitable especially when: 

• If teams are working on project topics that come from companies or other external organizations, skills-based grouping can be very effective, as it allows to match
  
   

Student-Selected Teams

In the student-selected team formation strategy, students have the autonomy to form their own groups. This method empowers students to choose their teammates based on personal preferences, existing relationships, or mutual interests in a topic. The underlying assumption is that students are best positioned to know with whom they work well. This approach can be complemented with adding some team composition requirements. For example in multidisciplinary courses, one could require teams to have maximum of X members from discipline A, maximum of Y members from discipline B and so on.  

How to motivate use of this method to students 

• Encourages ownership and responsibility for their learning experience and outcomes. 
• Allows students to leverage existing relationships or form new ones based on shared interests or complementary skills. 
• Fosters an environment where students can work with those they feel most compatible with, potentially increasing motivation and enjoyment. 

Potential challenges and how to avoid them: 

• There may be a tendency for friends to group together, which could lead to a lack of diversity in skills and perspectives. Encourage students to consider using the course as an opportunity to get to know new people.  

This example describes a relatively sophisticated implementation of student-selected team formation, that included preparatory exercises and teacher moderation. While it might be unfeasible for some courses, it is an inspiring example of bringing realism to team formation.  

Course details 

• Name & Code: Startup Experience, TU-E4100  
• Credits: 9cr 
• Length: 2 periods 
• Class size: roughly 100 participants per implementation 
• Team size: 5-8 members 
• Level: MSc, but BSc welcome 
• Status: Mandatory for roughly 50% of participants 
• Implementation: Fall 2023 
• Course in brief: Multidisciplinary, cross-cultural project teams generate a viable business concept, inc. customer need mapping, prototyping, business viability analysis & business model definition.  
• Key topics: Product & service development, entrepreneurship, creative practices 
• Other notable features: Open-ended development challenge where teams define their own project topic. This leads to high level of initial uncertainty. Such an approach and teaching methods in general are new to most participants. Course name and code has now changed.
   

Background 

Startup teams tend to form through personal connections, networking and organic collaboration rather than enforced grouping, as the norm in corporate settings. Practicing this kind of organic team formation is a key skill for those interested in entrepreneurial ventures, and this is why simulating it in the course setting was taken as a priority.  

With this in mind, the course utilized teacher-moderated student-selected team formation method. Actual team formation was organized as a face-to-face networking event.  

However, before the actual group formation, participants learned basic product development and entrepreneurship skills through individual work and workshops. The individual and group exercises were conducted to ensure that, by the time group formation event took place, most participants had already interacted with each other in some capacity. 

Preparatory steps 

While main focus in the first few weeks was learning the fundamentals of theory and practice of entrepreneurship and innovation, many exercises were conducted to support project team formation that took place later.  

Individual assignments: Participants completed exercises such as a personal strength and interest analysis, where they mapped their personal competencies and interests. This helped them become more aware of their own developer profile and how these could align with potential teammates.  

Group Exercises: During lectures on entrepreneurship and innovation, participants workshopped in ad-hoc groups. These exercises often included collective brainstorming, giving participants a chance to network and experience what it was like to work with different people.  

With this structure, participants were more prepared for actual team formation, as they knew both themselves and their classmates better.  

Right before the team formation even, a call for “team founders” was given to participants. These facilitators were not going to become project leaders but were framed as "company founders" rather than "bosses," emphasizing that their role was not to take on permanent leadership or direct others indefinitely. Participants also had the option to take on this role as pairs, reflecting how team formation often happens in real-life scenarios. 

Team Formation Event 

Team formation event lasted roughly two hours, and had two parts. The first hour focused on defining project topics for each team collectively. In the second hour, the actual team formation took place.  

Part 1: Project definition 

To start the first part, each founder – or founder pair - was assigned a separate table, where they defined some thematic starting points for their team, such as their interests, a specific technology, a user group, or a trend they found compelling. These starting points materialized themselves as large post-it notes, that people coming to visit the table could see easily.  

During the first hour of the event, course participants circulated around the tables, talking with the founders and other table visitors to see if their interests aligned and discussing potential directions the project theme could take. However, the founders had the authority to decide whether to include suggestions for direction or not.  

By the end of this initial phase, the project themes for each team had become clearer and it was possible for all course participants to find a project they could relate to.  

Part 2: Team formation 

In the second hour, participants were then asked to again circulate around the tables, examine the results of the first hour in terms of which teams were focusing on which kind of topics. End goal for everybody was to find a team that suited them the best. In practice this meant free discussion with the founders and other potential team members about people’s interests and skills.  

While team formation was very freeform and students were expected to figure things out themselves, there were some rules for forming the teams. Teams had a maximum size. If a team was nearing its limit, the table facilitator ensured that decisions about final team composition were made collectively, with a strong recommendation to prioritize compatibility in team members’ schedules. 

Further, the goal from the course side was to have as diverse teams as possible, as team diversity fosters both innovation as well as learning. With this in mind, by default teams were not allowed to have several people studying the same major in the same program. Teachers knew beforehand that this rule needed to be relaxed at some point, because strictly following it with the participant profile distribution that the course had would mean that some individuals couldn’t find a team in the end. However, the relaxation of the rule was not done until late in the process when problems started to emerge, to ensure that teams became as diverse as possible.  

Tips & Instructor reflection 

This method is socially quite challenging. Based on student feedback, for natural networkers, this team formation method worked exceptionally well and they enjoyed the process thoroughly. However, for more introverted students, it was challenging, especially if they were curious about a broad variety of development topics, trends and technologies and struggled to define clearly what they were really interested in and passionate about. These issues can be addressed with the preparatory exercises, however. For example, to make mingling with others in the team formation event a bit easier, simple interviews or discussion exercises where participants need to talk to someone they don’t know know can help students be more prepared and skilled.  

It is also important to note that teachers can and should play an important role here too in the form of observing and supporting students. Since this highly interactive method can feel uncomfortable for some students, especially those less confident socially, additional guidance should be offered to help them find a suitable team. 

While this is a relatively complex method with certain challenges from student perspectives, it does the course particularly well. It enables meaningful simulation of a real startup team formation process, and prepares our graduates for such situations. While socially demanding—requiring students to engage in conversation and actively participate—this challenge aligns with the course’s learning objectives. It provides an opportunity for students to develop essential entrepreneurial skills, such as networking and pitching their ideas to others.