Everyone has that “oh no” moment. Mine was the start of the Fall semester when I learned in detail about the MGA 682 course’s Interaction Design Project. It was another group project that instantly gave me the feeling of dread and the thought,
“This is going to be a terrible idea and experience. Can I do this individually?”
Still, despite knowing my future, I moved forward, trying my best to pull through.
The Beginning: Understand
During the “understand” phase, I reviewed the project description, skimmed through Jake Knapp’s 5-Day sprint book, and tried my best to think of a possible solution that would do well with this kind of situation. The pandemic has become a sensitive subject for many, especially those against vaccination, so how were we going to get students to adhere to the university’s COVID protocol? After thinking about it, I remembered it’s best to start with a simple design for the weakest among us.
Filled with ideas and some relief that this may be easier to tackle than previously thought, I awaited the next assignment.
Team? TEAM?!
I was added to challenge 2, group 3, which consisted of Daniela, Kyriakos, Melinda, and Swaralipi. A few whom I knew of and their work “ethic”, others we’d have to wait and see. Despite a total of five, it felt like 2 or 3 only at any given time. The balance was off from the beginning, where most of the work rested on two people. There was no such word as “teamwork”, just me trying to claw ideas, participation, and answers from silent mouths. Unlike other teams, where each person had one role at any given time, I was often wearing multiple hats during the post-midnight sessions while others skidded off the map.
Diverge-Converge
In theory, divide and conquer seemed like a reasonable thing to do, as many people don’t want to be stuck on a call for too long, but there needs to be compromise in that sprints take longer than an hour. Given the online environment, most of the team opted for the Divide part, of the divide and conquer, diverge-converge phases, where really it was just them silently screaming,
“I don’t want to be in this call!”
A lot was “diverge” during our sprints, where they asynchronously put up their tidbits, if anything at all before the due date, on the shared document or Miro board, and then someone goes in to clean up the mess. For example, the HMWs were started synchronously, but left to be finished asynchronously or next session for certain members.
There wasn’t much to the “converge” process, not many thoughts or differing opinions, just silence or single word phrases in response to my inquiries into their minds as they stared blankly at the colorful Miro board. It was only near the end when an effort was actually made to do something together. Had I known I was dealing with empty shells, I would have skipped the teeth pulling and just bulldozed ahead to the next step in the process.
In-person Vs Online
Some might think it was just because of the remote environment; conducting an online sprint sounds impossible, but two years down the road in a pandemic and online master’s, we should be used to thinking over a Google meet call. Honestly, I don’t think having it in-person would have changed the outcome very much. The only easier thing about having an in-person meeting set-up would have been getting people to actually show-up. You have to be at work or school, so no chance to miss the meeting.
Not So Surprising Difficulties
I don’t think anything was really surprising for me. I prefer working online, so the sprint itself was doable. If anything, I surprisingly, or not surprisingly, began questioning my career path. Do I have enough patience to deal with this kind of situation in a company setting? Can I handle people who openly admit to not doing the reading or any work, and never learning the simple software skills that were expected of us?
The most difficult part was expecting others to actually give 100% effort during the short meeting time that everyone agreed on. It was an hour. Despite having more time than an actual 5-day sprint, it just didn’t feel like a success, so the most rewarding moment was when I was done with it.
