Week 2 - Dev Log -Storming

Week 2 Team Ideation

Forming Storming Norming is the name of the game, no not our game, just what “they” want us to do.

So this week we need a Team Name, the Team has been referred to as “Team Do Sum Werk” a tagline that I use with my students. Although it is pretty good it wouldn't be ours and so the name of the team must come from us all in our first ideation process.

This was a great opportunity to use the Miro board I set up last week. Put our heads together and do some storming.

We decided on the Ideation process “Crazy 8’s” (Haryanto 2019), Nick led the charge and the team managed to narrow the ideas down to a few which ultimately finished with us deciding on “Error 418” as our team name. The Team is now official.

The week has been busy with meetings, quite long ones too. This was good as we got a feel for each other as we discussed our goals and expectations for the module and the project. It feels like we are all on the same page and the team is really starting to feel like a solid unit although it is early days. We decided that Thursdays being our main meeting day, aim to arrange our supervisor meeting for this day and use it also to plan sprints and have retrospectives. During the week this should remain flexible as we work around other commitments.

My main goal out of the module is to experience the team working from the inside, I still have doubts about where I fit. It seems like everyone has a clear idea of what they want to do or get from the project. Nick, Elliot, and James want to get a feel of Unreal, with James clearly falling into programming. Paul is eager to make and model whereas I am still unsure. Learn from those around me and further my understanding of the development process I guess.

We discussed this as a team and referred to the definitions of Team Purpose and Performance Goals from Wisdom of Teams (Katzenbach and Smith 2015: 45-52). We eventually settled on the Team Purpose that would Collectively Improve Game Development Skills and Portfolios. And our Performance Goal is to create an Artifact of a high enough quality to pitch to a publisher. I'm into this Idea but I fear even at this stage that what we have in our minds will need to be trimmed down a lot.

Following this week's meeting I put together the Rapid Ideation Plan, this would outline a number of the strategies that we aim to use to be an effective team. I decided to add the Team Roles to this. Although this goes against the Agile Principles that we had chosen to follow, I felt it to be important for the team to keep consistency when we go into production. This would allow responsibilities to be shared and decisions to be made without lengthy discussions. It is important that the team is fully happy with this as it will need the team to trust the judgment of the individual. After I pitched this to the team they all seemed happy with a view to making changes to the roles once production begins.

It was decided this week that we would start to pull together our research to enable us to begin with the ideation process. It feels like the team already has an idea but we have yet to spit it out, there is a reluctance to do this without taking the necessary steps in the ideation process. I want to go into the first meeting with our supervisor with a solid idea or with a real starting point. I am itching to get started but I know that there is still the foundation of the teams working that we need to get out of the way. Nick is doing an excellent job of keeping us all on the same page, definitely suited to his role.

Rapid Ideation Plan

https://unreal730.atlassian.net/l/c/fpoYkZjm

HARYANTO, Boby. 2019. “How to Do Crazy 8’S Remotely.” Medium [online]. Available at: https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-do-crazy-8s-remotely-223d7fbd5e98 [Accessed 16 Jun 2021].

KATZENBACH, Jon R and Douglas K SMITH. 2015. The Wisdom of Teams : Creating the High-Performance Organization. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.