Day 21

Big day... time to get the project back on track.  Normally I would not be involved, I'd sit back, do my part, and when things fell apart try to help recover it.  This time I am actively trying to right the ship at the start instead.  I really don't like doing that, I prefer to think that everything will work out and then get annoyed when it doesn't. 

We started off class with Larry and Kim giving us some information on where they see us being at so far, and what a Team Charter is.  This is good, it sets the stage for what we need to talk about today.  When the question comes up of what is next everyone just looks around the room.  "5 minute break" I finally say.  I guess, technically, we are leaderless at the moment and that is how we should proceed.

I snag some of the other people from the weekend meeting to see what they think now that Larry and Kim have talked, the basic plan stays the same so I write the agenda down... item #0 is to pick my replacement :-)  My goal is to make sure that everyone feels that they have a voice in the process.  Picking who is going to lead the process is a good first step.  If they pick me then I have their backing, if not then they wouldn't have wanted me doing it anyways.  I get the only nomination. We move one.

I talk a bit about what happened last week and the plan is to now go around the 38 person circle and get everyone to respond to 2 questions: what do they want to get out of the project, and what do they need to feel involved.  This starts a discussion on why we are doing this.  I pointed out that each team was informed that we were going to do this, and it was up on Facebook for everyone to read.  If they were not happy with the idea then they should have said something before the meeting.  We talk a bit more.  We vote.  People are unhappy with the result so continue to argue.  Kim saves the day.  Thanks Kim.  We break for lunch.

I talk to a few people at lunch and when we come back I make it clear (I hope) that the before lunch thing was meant to help us address the issues that came out of last week - basically people not being heard and people losing trust in each other.  We won't answer the questions, but people need to keep that in the front of their minds.  We also start following one of our rules of play: you only get to talk twice on a topic.  This makes things move much faster!

Next up is the proposal to use the Lean UX process.  There are complaints about this idea too.  Apparently people just don't read things... sigh.  We vote on it, and the break off into groups of 5 for 1.5 hours to do the Lean UX process.  We actually finish early!!!1one! 

At this point in time I can see the end, and we need to move along.  I take over instead of doing things by vote.  We don't have time, and people should now feel involved.

Based on all the feedback we get a list of 6 features to do.  Time now to vote for our leaders.  I wanted a write in vote, but we decide to use a show of hands.  What is funny is that the steam that "won" last week and Maria are in all the leadership positions.. which means that we are back where we fucking started!  However now people have had a say.  I wound up running against Haig since he was the only one nominated for a position and I wanted to be sure that people chose that position too.  Thankfully they chose him and not me!

10 minutes until 5:00 and we have one last thing to do.  One person suggests that we wait for our leaders to tell us what to do.  No!  We have come this far, and there is very little left to do, and waiting for the leaders means losing another week.  We break off into teams around the features that we are interested, and the foundation team which is going to be mostly programmers deciding things like version control and directory layout.

We finish by 5:00.  Agenda done.  My voice is shot.  Off to LEGO class.

Day 18

Pitch day!  We each did our pitches, answered questions from the panel, and then had lunch.  Once that was done they announced the "winner", the team with the idea that most resonated with them.  The team I was on did not win, but was one of the other two teams that got an honourable mention... basically we had features they liked.

We then had to get organized.  One thing is that no team had planned ahead on how to actually organize us, well one team had a bit of an org chart.  Chaos ensued with a number of people feeling disenfranchised.  Arron and I have a disagreement on this, I see people as choosing not to be involved, he says they were not included.

In the end I wound up on the "management" team as co-lead for the developers/programmers/engineers.  I think I just cycle through those names when every I have to talk about the team :-)

We wound up with 11 managers in a group of 39 people... mostly because the teams started to "need" communication channels, so we had a UI/UX person be the representative on the engineering team... which is insane since we have NO IDEA HOW WE ARE GOING TO ORGANIZE THE TEAMS YET!

Day 14

Rain rain go away.  It poured when I was about half way to the CDM. Rain jacket? check. Backpack rain jacket? Check. Umbrella? Umbrella? Umbrella? Nope. I got very wet.

At dailies we presented first.  We didn't get much feedback (not good) we learned a few things, but not exactly what we needed.  We think the problem was that we stopped too soon.  We had the right idea but needed to, at the very least, probably go a bit further.  We should have applied the 5 whys to the RFP to see why we think they are giving us this RFP.  Live and learn, and we didn't have to throw out anything so there is that.

Most other groups wanted to make games, or apps, or websites, or games AND apps AND websites.  One thing that comes out of it is that there are probably many audiences, and we may be picking more than one "winner".

We also showed George our prototype film.  He seemed pleased and is allowing us to use music, as long as it is done more as a sound effect.  Arron and I talked about that on the way to BCIT afterwards and think we finally get exactly what he means.   Shooting this Friday and, if we are really lucky we will be done on Sunday.  I doubt we will be done on Sunday, but it is good to have goals!

I think I have a cold.  Sigh.

Day 10

Projects had a quick daily on our trips to the stores.  So now we have our persona as a team and the persona of a company.  Cool.  Well both teams no longer exist so what is up next?  A new project of course.

The basic idea is that we are turning the projects course into a project.  How meta I know.  Before we dive into that though Larry showed us an example of iterations gone through to make a commercial.  Pretty neat, starting with, you hopefully guessed it, discovering who the client is.  Iterations, wait that was from yesterday in Improv.  Liking how things tie together.  We are taken from sketches, through different iterations of the commercial, and up to the final version.  Of course it comes complete with the basics of what would happen in dailies.

We move on to RFPs and RFP responses.  And we are given our RFP - how to get the process of the MDM out to people in an interactive way.  There is more to it than that but good enough for now.  We can pick our teams.  5 people per team, has to have a programmer, has to have a visual person, has to have an archiver (I think those where the 3 things...) can't be all women, can't be all ESL, probably cannot be all the people who teach too.  Edward asks if I want to work with him, sure never worked with Edward before.  Deb either, so we ask her.  Then Carlos, who I have worked with but I am not that adamant about not working with the same people twice, and Carlos is cool :-)  Then Vincy and Heiwei want to steal me... eventually we all team up to be a group of 6.  That is until Vincy turns traitor by the lure of chocolate to another team :-(.

Now we have our team... time for lunch.

Now we ate... time to work.

Having finally learned we put together the team charter at the start.  Good plan!  Edward wants to try managing, cool.  Deb will help mentor him in that, also cool.  We do a SWOT for us and the MDM.  We figure out who interacts with the MDM.  We ask questions of Larry and Kim.  We come up with a set of 10 questions and about 7 people to interview.  We will be discovering what the MDM is all about, which is good as we are in the discovery phase.  We also figure out who we will interview (each of us do about 3 interviews in pairs).  Who did I interview?  Not going to tell... did I mention it is a competitive process?  Se are basically going to do a 39 person project.  The team that is selected to have their solution implemented will manage the project.  Hmmmm... winning is fun, but that is pressure... oh wait we are here for pressure... bring it on! :-)

Arron and I head out to BCIT... long day.

Day 6

Got in early today to practice the presentation one last time.  Noticeably the presentation is not in dropbox... seems that it was on the computer but never got pushed up.  I get a copy, we put it in the dropbox, and get ready.

First up rules of play for the session, don't talk, safe environment, etc... We are told by Larry that we have to frame our presentation.  We are up first to present... with this money wrench in our plans.  We manage to choose Vincy to do this, she does, but clearly not well enough as it is pointed out that we didn't do it... lesson learned - clarity of presentation.

Once we are done come the critiques. Try to remember as much of the feedback as possible... lesson learned - bring a pad and pen to dailies.

All the other teams go.  We had the shortest presentation (maybe 5 minutes with the figuring out who started our speaking, thanks Vincy!) and simplest deliverable.  Of course we, like pretty much every other team, missed the mark... a few more lessons learned - verify your understanding of the project is the biggest.

Break for lunch.

After lunch there is a presentation by Luke Jurevicius who created The Adventures of Figaro Pho.  Very interesting, I really like story I am finding. Oddly enough at lunch I talked to Judy and she has a plan for story with the company... weird or what?!

Come back and do a reflection on our branding so far, KFC: Keep, Fix, Change, based on the feedback we got in the morning.  I think almost everyone felt like failures, I had to remind my group that we only fail if we don't learn from it.  Next up, the next iteration of our project: 20 minutes to take a box of random crafty things and make a new prototype of our branding.  We spend the next 10 minutes coming up with ideas, and 10 minutes crafting it. We decide that knowledge was the most important part, and come up with a walnut crafted out of playdough.  There is a tree too.  Perhaps I am not visual enough but I was happy with just the green (yes green) nut.  Joey did an amazing job to make the wall nut look realistic.  Amazing.

We "get" to go first again and everyone in my group tries to get me to present.  Why always me?!  Maria does it instead.  Lesson learned - but succinct in your presentation.  Best quote of the day was something like (yeah not an actual quote) "After you have sold it, shut up."

Every team gets a turn taking something abstract and making it real.  Another good thing heard from Patrick (at some point earlier in the day) was to "create impactful moments".

Finally we get assigned new teams.  Bye bye old teams.  I am now on a team with another group of people I have never worked with before.  Cool. The task?  For us it is to go to Futureshop, both the store and the website, and get to know them. We have 20 minutes to come up with our impression on what their messaging is. Should also go to competitors and check them out. My group decides to hit Futureshop tomorrow and then head out to Metrotown to check out some competitor stores. Then I remember I have a family and we have a school BBQ to go to... grrr (at myself). Well I can give Metrotown a miss, I know the other stores. Hopefully I will have time to do both.

Off to BCIT for LEGO!

Day 2

2nd day and already behind somehow (posting this the day after it took place... but I did start teaching my LEGO robotics class that night, so I guess I didn't have time to post this).

The Projects course was Tuesday.  After a brief introduction to the course we were broken up into 5 groups (I think it was 5) at random.  We then had to give a low resolution plan for getting Larry, the instructor, a cup of coffee.  We had 5 minutes to do it in.  I think all the teams spent a lot of time figuring out what the requirements were, and not enough time on the how we would carry out the plan.

Larry then refined it for us, the simplest plan to get him a cup of black coffee.  We drew a 3 cell comic: get the money, get the coffee at 7/11, give the coffee. I guess if I drank coffee I would have noticed the coffee machine outside of the classroom :-/  The neat one that came out of that was the "find out if the client really needs what they want". Does Larry need coffee or caffeine?  Will a coke do instead?  Things you don't think of under pressure sometimes :-)

Next up SWOT.  Write down our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.  Share them with the class.  So 39 people did that... took a while.  Learned more about each other though, and hopefully about ourselves too.  Self reflection seems to be a big part of the program, which makes sense, how else do you know if you are growing and where to improve?

After lunch we got our first assignment, to be shown in "dailies" next Tuesday morning.  In our group of 7 people from the morning, come up with a low-resolution (read: you won't mine throwing it away when you find out it is wrong next week) digital artifact.  That was basically the extent of the assignment, make up your own scope I guess.

First up in our group OARRs (Objectives, Agenda, Roles, and Responsibilities). Next a group SWOT. Next up what role best describes each one of us?  Programmer, Web Programmer, 2d artist, 3d technical artist, UX/UI designer, writer, and photographer.  Next up write down the thing each of us values most.  Beauty, teamwork, sharing knowledge (we had others, this is what we pruned it down to).  Next up spin wheels for a bit, but come up with a few things. Get a bit off the rails talking about a bee for a logo. Somehow come up with Push Button Studios as a potential name.  Next up Larry gives us another tool to use, tried it but it didn't help, spin wheels for a while longer.  Settle on throwing out anything to do with bees and instead go with Push Button Studios.  Come up with a tagline none of us really likes, and a 2 line story to introduce us.  We also settle on making an interactive web page for our digital artifact.

Once I got home (after teaching the LEGO robotics) I talked to Judy about this and it pretty much comes out that the problem that we have is that we, the team, are the product, and that is what we are trying to brand... but it is really really really hard to come up with an identity when you don't have a product.  We don't have a product, so we are going to have to pretend to have one.  Judy also points me at a TED talk that helps and I find a presentation on branding too.  What does a programmer know about branding?!  Not much, that's what! Tomorrow try to get this figured out I guess.