Summarization of useful practices and tools from MSD class - Part I

At the end of the course, it would be helpful for me to think of all the practices I have done in the classes, all the tools I have applied and among them, what will I use and how will I use in future. Actually, there are quite a lot of activities in MSD class, which makes the subject so special – to the degree that I describe in the previous post: The way MSD class operates did create a culture.

Activities that I mentioned are various, ranging from small to big, simple to complex: group work on NATO paper in the first week, building base race in second week, the application of IDEO cards in the third week. Some other notable activities are standup meeting to introduce term project’s idea, planning poker and user story used in “cool software” scenario. To demonstrate how to evaluate objectively, we did Kongregate game case. One interesting activity is “smelly design” in which we sketched a digital nose on paper and by Balsamiq. It did give us a sense of interface design, an important step to conduct our term paper. We also did Spaghetti cantilever and have funny time together to see the way team operate. In this activity, we also sketched “design activity graph” to capture the design thinking of the team.  Some lessons regarding the scope of a project and the relation between number of iterations and the success of the projects are enlightened in “Battleship” game case.

 

However, I will not apply all these activities in my future career due to the fact that some activities are designed exclusively to use in class only. So what will I become? It’s hard to predict, but now I want to become a project manager, maybe working part-time as a lecturer in e-commerce.

Ok, now let’s talk more detailed about some useful activities and tools. I group them into three categories: 1) interaction and communication, 2) Project & team management 3) Requirement and innovation, though the separations between them are not really clear.

Interaction and communication

·         Standup meeting:

The standup meeting is so helpful. It helped me to quickly introduce most important points of my term paper to the whole class to find partner. When I become a part-time teacher, this practice will definitely be in my class. Besides, as a project manager, I feel that this is a good way to start the daily team meeting.

·         Retrospection sheet:

The team that I (will) manage will use retrospection sheet as a mean of achieving a lot of goals, for example to find way to co-operate, or to find better way of working etc. Other factors such as productivity and collaboration status of a team can also be retrospect more efficiently by using the sheets. Below is one example of “Start team” sheet which is used in the first stage of the team so that team members can reach consensus of how to work together.

More sheets with different purpose can be found at http://www.softwarestrategy.co.uk/dlgsheets/

In part II, I will discuss more about tools in Project & team management and Requirement and innovation categories.