Fall 2007

A lot happened this week:


- As part of the Content brainstorming team, I met twice over the weekend to develop some GUI and back-end data representation ideas. We came up with some ideas on how to represent content in xml, on how Silverlight could be used for video and GUI technology, and both realistic and crazy GUI mockups. Our results can be found here.

- I was tapped to handle customer relations and head up the prep team for the customer meeting. We met several times during the week to turn all the GUI ideas that were generated over the weekend into fully skinned GUI mockups. The final images and the presentation can be found here.

- As part of the Data Management team, I attended our meeting and worked through figuring out source control in VS, using Brad and Dr. Wong's instructions, and the tutorial files on the 410 resources site.

- I communicated with the customer to arrange a meeting time, and get resources (minutes and pictures; though the minutes were already there thanks to Sohum) uploaded to the customer site.

- Got a meeting room reserved and a projector secured (both through Dr. Wong) for the customer meeting. Also created a meeting agenda and arranged for a speaker (Felipe) to present a project overview.

- As Backup PM, I attended a leader meeting on Thursday to get up to speed on everything that is going on in the different groups.

There weren't really any big difficulties on this side of things from my perspective. We missed a couple of things the customer was looking to see in the GUI mockups, but I don't think we missed his expectations. For the Data Management team, we didn't have any milestones until today, so there wasn't anything to make progress on besides figuring out how to use source control and link to a database.

For the next customer meeting, we will review the previous meeting notes again after the deliverables are complete, to see if anything was missed. I think the task list we are going to keep with the customer will help in this regard also.

Isn't that checking the barn door after the cows have fled?  How about a more pro-active rather than reactive approach? -- SW

Other than that, we need to get the milestones out when a team is formed and then hopefully at least a week ahead of when they are expected to be complete. This week is an exception since it is our first set of milestones.

This week we created a stronger leadership structure, defining 4 task teams and then 2 secondary teams, plus the task team leader group. The task teams are working on the design and coding of the pieces of the actual project, while all of the non-leaders have additional roles in one of the secondary teams. The secondary teams are responsible for prepping for the customer meeting and for researching technologies we might want to use in the project.
And where are these team memberships documented?  Buried in meeting minutes is not a useful place for information that one needs to refer to on an on-going basis.  -- SW Sharepoint lists are quite useful for this. -- KR

Having the two sets of teams allowed more people to step into a leadership role, and also allowed for some of the quieter members to contribute in a small group environment. It is also helping that we always have someone in our groups who is in a group that we aren't, so that there is more connection about what is going on in the various parts of the project. I think we are also getting a good sense of the specialties and abilities of the various team members.

We also had a more focused meeting this week, which was great. I think having a clear, focused topic for the meeting helped in this regard.

The downside of having everyone in two teams is that things sometimes feel chaotic, like a lot of different things are going on. I think this is a matter of tradeoffs though, and the benefits are definitely worth it.

There are still some problems with meetings, both internal and with the customer, where we spend too much time discussing or rehashing points. We need to up the focus here a little more. I think Hubert in his "Timelord" role can help a lot in this regard, but his authority here needs to be reinforced. The one time he spoke up about time in our internal meeting on monday it was pretty much ignored. Perhaps we can come up with a signal for when someone has 1 or 2 minutes left to finish speaking, and when discussion of something starts to go overboard.

I think I identified the solutions above, but specifically, we should make sure that the layers of how many teams there are don't get two deep (I think two layers of teams is probably a good balance point). For meetings, we need to keep writing specific agendas with estimated times on them, and Hubert needs authority to enforce the times (with a reasonable leeway for good discussion to develop). I think we should use signals (as simple as raising a number of fingers to indicate the minutes left) to let speakers know when they need to wrap it up.

I was pleased with the work that Jee Yun and Sohum did to create the skinned GUI mockups. I think that Luke really appreciated the attention to detail and the creativity that came out in this work. While Kevin had some understandable other committments this week, he contributed some valuable input to the mockup creation, and I would like to continue to hear more from him in the future. Thanks go to you guys for the work that you did.

I was also very impressed with Felipe's presentation at the customer meeting. He stepped up to create and present an overview of the project that helped us both round out the meeting and also get on the same page with the customer.

Overall I was very happy with everyone that I got to delegate tasks to in my role as customer meeting prep leader. The success in that task is really reflective of their efforts.