CTS 001: Post Mortem

Our presentation for our very first group challenge went well, and I'm glad our hard work - staying back until late at night to brainstorm, conceptualize, and discuss - paid off! Personally, I gained a lot of experience since I have never really done group work as heavy as this before.

Which brings me to to the topic of post-mortem. Here's a quick list of things that I learnt from this challenge:

- Know the objective. Ask yourself, "by the end of this meeting, what do we want to get done?". Only then we would know if a group session has been successful or not.

- Deadlines are important. Timeline. Planning out the framework. Don't leave things to chance. Push yourself and others to follow through with the task at hand.

- Delegating is key to avoid self-exhaustion. Don't try to be the hero and do all the work! Yes, even if you think you'd do a better job than your teammates. Make sure everyone contributes. When a team functions properly, everything will run more smoothly.

- Ideas and executions. Process and product. Both in each are important, one should know how to balance the two.

- The final presentation is also important and it wouldn't hurt to rehearse roughly what we're going to say.

- Be resourceful. Know where to get stuff and how to get stuff done. For example, we discovered several places to hold our brainstorming sessions!

- Dress for success. Mr. Charles appreciates "tribe uniforms"; if we put in that extra effort to dress a little bit differently. (Like today where we wore red in our wardrobes, in honour of the Plantomancer's struggles and sacrifices!)

- Idea generation process. Brainstorming, and developing ideas. Knowing when to stop brainstorming and start developing ideas, keeping the timeline/deadline in mind.

- Learning not to be feature-creeps and do Rapid Iterative Prototyping (R.I.P; meaning going through something roughly, and going back on it again and again, refining it along the way). Getting too stuck on details will waste time! Always keep the big picture in mind.

- Clarity. Making sure the concept/idea (served fresh!) gets through to the end user (in this case, the audience and lecturer). Don't make things too wordy. Presentations a la Steve Jobs; clear and concise, yet sleek and minimal.

- Documentation. Proof of discussion. All our hard work would be pointless if it's not recorded! Perhaps delegating to a person to record while the rest discusses, taking turns, etc.

- Consistency in updating of blog/follow ups/tutorial sessions. (Also a form of proof of work!).

I suppose a lot of these challenges are a simulation of real work life; working in a team, juggling deadlines, etc. All in all good experience. Hopefully with each challenge, we, the members of SUSHI, will learn and refine our raw talents even more; continuing our journey as young designers in training!


Sayonara for now.
- Aina.