Overview

You’re working on a collaborative project for a course. One of your teammates, Jake, isn’t pulling his weight. You and two other team members (Jose and Kate) pulled together research and wrote a first draft of the document, which you met to discuss last week; Jake was supposed to run and compile data from a short survey, but he came to the meeting without the survey. He admitted, sheepishly, that he hadn’t had time to do the survey yet, but promised to complete it over the weekend and get you his section for the report by Monday morning.

It’s now Wednesday, and no word from the wayward Jake. As the Background Texts section shows, the team has attempted to contact him several times, with no luck. The team is meeting later in the week to discuss the second (and next-to-final) draft of the report, and you need the survey data and a summary of the results to write the recommendations and conclusion sections. Obviously, the grade for your project will suffer without this information. Even though none of you thinks it’s fair that all of your grades for the project will be affected by the lack of the survey information, none of you has a great deal of spare time to do extra work to take up the slack.

After some discussion with your other teammates over e-mail, the three of you decide to contact your professor for advice (and, you hope, to reach an agreement with the professor to take this situation into account when she grades the project). You’ve checked the syllabus (see Background Texts section), and it includes a section about how to handle problems on teams. The three of you decide to create a short (two pages or so) memo in which you lay out the problem and propose a solution.