Week 3: Ideas with a Vision

26 January – 1 February, 2015:

Week 3 was our last week of conceptualisation, and it helped that our two main goals were to create the first version of a vision document to share with Vasso Paliouras, and then use this document to help steer our brainstorming towards a few concepts to pitch to Vasso and her team during our weekly meeting with Lending Hearts on Friday.  Our Scrum Retrospective and Sprint Planning on Monday helped us encapsulate these goals as user stories.

On Tuesday, the team gathered and helped Ruchi iterate on and narrow down her vision document to the bare bones of what we wanted to accomplish in the project based on our conversations with Vasso.  We then sent this document to Vasso for her feedback and worked with her to clarify any confusion she might have had with the content.

We pooled our resources on Wednesday to come up with new ideas and iterate on old ones while keeping our goals from the vision document in mind.  Individually, we created slides on a specific idea (whether one from the team or one we came up with individually) to share with our teammates on Thursday.  Dave Culyba joined us for that meeting and gave us some pointers on how to effectively narrow our ideas down and format them to present them to the client on Friday.

Our brainstorming resulted in a collective decision to present four high level concepts to Vasso and board members Constantine and Mary Nell.  Out of “Space Station”, “Town”, “Beehive / Ant hill” and “Story Branches”, they were excited about the idea of the space setting and the creative possibilities of a community telling stories together.  We learned a lot that would help direct us in the weeks to come.

One of Ruchi’s tasks this week was to create a survey for the Lending Hearts community with input from the team and our client.  This was completed with Mary Nell’s help and sent to Vasso to be shared with the families by the end of the week.

Besides the survey, Hannah has taken charge of room decorations and began communicating with Janice Metz after presenting some ideas and a budget to the team.  Wei completed the Baymax 6 team logo in time for it to be placed on the opening slide of our presentation to the  client on Friday, and her art was received well.  Hilman and Sam have set up bug tracking and version control, and Cheryl-Jean set up the team website and project description for our ETC page, and created a rough sprint plan for the rest of the term.

We will move into the pre-production phase of the project plan next week, and begin planning for Quarter Walkarounds and presentations.  This will involve delving deeper into our idea with regards to deliverables, scope and design, getting feedback from survey responses, and by Friday, hopefully creating a rough prototype or design plan to share with our client.

Hope everyone has a great Superbowl weekend!