As we progress into our week 2, our team had a detailed idea of what the project is about.
We met with client Melanie from Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Department for the first time on Monday, Feb 23. She gave a brief overview of what her job is, and what she wants from us.
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity (short for DRBC) plan describes the procedures, roles, and responsibilities required for the business function to enable timely recovery and continue to provide acceptable levels of service for up to 30 days in the event of a disaster or significant business disruption. The Plan components address the activities and communications that would be carried out in the event of a loss of facility, technology, people, and supplier.
It’s quite different from what we previous imagined. DRBC is not about rescuing people from emergency, it’s about how to continue the usual business functions in regardless of whatever happened. Most of the actions in the plan are about communication and knowledge sharing.
Our client is currently doing a table-top simulation exercise with all the departments in CMU regularly (at least once a year). She wants us to make a digital game or tool to help her making the exercise more engaging, fun and interactive.
We did several brainstorm sessions during the past week, and came up with many different ideas. But the deeper we think about it, more questions and uncertainties appear. We talked with our instructor Dave, and also industry guru Jesse Schell for inspirations as well. And they gave us some valuable solutions and examples.
On Friday, Feb 27, our client Melanie came to ETC again to run us through a mock DRBC table-top simulation exercise. The scenario is if the lab on the 4th floor of PTC blows up and damaged the whole building, how are we going to continue working on our current project. The whole process was fun, and gave us a detailed idea on what the exercise is like. After the exercise, we had a long discussion with our client, solved lots of questions and uncertainties that we had. Melanie was very helpful, and gave us a very clear idea what exactly she wants, also leaving us enough space of freedom for our creativity.
After the meeting, everyone had a solid game idea in their mind. We had another meeting session to gather up everyone’s idea. We will take the following weekend to give everyone time to consolidate and refine their ideas, and talk about it again on next Monday. And I think after we have the weekly faculty meeting with Dave and Ricardo next Monday, we should be able to finalize our game idea and start to make our first prototype.