This year the Engauge Digital social committee decided to pose a challenge to the entire office. Because the office is split into teams and everyone is busy on their projects, they want to make sure everyone still gets together to socialize as a company, not just in our groups. So the challenge is to have each team host a social hour once a month. After all teams have taken their turn, everyone in the office will vote on which team hosted the best social.

The Controlled Chaos (C2) team was the first to host the social hour. Our theme was “Bloody Valentine” and the event was held on Friday, Feb 13th.

• A heart shape piñata was provided for patrons to come up and take a whack.
• The team took personal time to cook yummy finger food and bring frosty beverages.
• The original Friday the 13^th movie played on the TVs in one of the agency’s conference rooms.
• We announced the rules to our game!!

For 28 days, between Friday 2/13 and Friday 3/13, we played a game of Slasher. Slasher is like ‘Assassin’, a live action role playing game where players try to eliminate each other in an effort to become the last surviving player. Each player was given a victim’s name and a word they had to get their victim to say in order to remove them from the game and collect their card(s). By the end of the month the winner is determined based either on the number of cards accumulated (in case there is more than one person still playing), or by being the only person left in the game.

All in all it was a really great time, people got very creative in order to kill one another. It was fun to see how skeptical a player would get if someone they never talked to suddenly was trying to have a conversation with them, or to watch someone get eliminated because they got so excited about a topic they didn’t even think they were being targeted.  In the end, I think we accomplished what the social committee set out to do- we got the office mingling!

And the results are …

Winner

Richard Guy

No. of victims: 2 (Darren Kennedy and Lauren Hickey)

Richard eliminated each victim by sending out his minions to do his dirty work, but being present at the right time to hear the word.  Both of his victims had already collected so many cards he was the clear winner when they were taken out.

Richard’s Favorite Kill: Jeff Hilimire

“Rick Diaz got him at his b-day shin-dig in the fitness center … Rick wrote his word [GUMBO] on a card and I gave it to him with his cake/gift, and he said the word aloud questioning it in front of EVERYONE!”

Honorable Mentions (single handedly eliminated their victim, no card collections necessary)

Darren Kennedy

No. of victims: 4 (Ryan Tuttle, Rick Diaz, Mark Unrein and Mike Richards)

Darren’s Favorite elimination: Mike Richards

“It involved the most set-up (dialogue-wise). He and Josh were playing ping pong and I started a conversation about Jay’s iPhone app demo that day – and asked who they thought developed the iPhone App SDK – Apple or a Third Party.  Mike said Apple – which was his word.”

Lauren Hickey

No. of victims: 5 (Ivey Cargill, Drew Feldman, Patrick Brandt, Amanda Neel and Rick Merced)

Lauren’s Favorite elimination: Drew Feldman

It was pretty simple: “…asked him what clients the Pigs Might Fly Team has and he said the word ‘Georgia.’ Pretty much just caught him off guard.”

Controlled Chaos Team favorite Elimination

Shawn Henck

Mike Richards got Amanda Neel to tell Shawn that she needed him for a Behavioral Research interview. She said she needed to two developers that write different languages, so she chose Mike (.net, etc) and Shawn (java, etc). She even brought a video camera to make it look very legitimate…

She started asking both of them questions and of course eventually Shawn said his word “Creative”. Even though Shawn and the rest of the C2 team were skeptical as he walked to the meeting, he let down his guard and Mike got him good!!!

We presented Richard with his prize this week!

Slasher Winner

Here is the design on the mug created by Travis Bailey

On behalf of the C2 team, we hope you enjoyed our social hour and Slasher game! We look forward to all the social in the coming months … 

“The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.” — MORRIS KLINE, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty

Over the past few months I’ve really started to enjoy being involved in team retrospectives; all of us get together and review how things are going and what we can do to improve or become more accountable. It’s great to watch the team grow together and trust each other enough to discuss both successes and improvement areas. There are never any fingers pointed at a single person, we just work to create goals as a unit and everyone works to make sure they are doing their part. These meetings can be called “lessons learned,” “retrospectives” or “postmortems.”  To keep it consistent I’ll use the term “retrospective” in this blog. PMI lists these meetings as part of the project closing phase. Because our team uses agile we actually have these at the close of each iteration (or phase/wave).

What I’ve noticed about doing these retrospective meetings after each sprint is that we are able to use the detail from the meeting to put towards the next phase of the project. So we are constantly learning and evolving our goals to improve our team and product. In the past when I closed a project the meetings were lively and well documented but there wasn’t any follow through. The meeting took place at the end of the project, once the meeting was over everyone moved on. The discussion is filed away in some shared drive that no one will ever access again. What good does it really do for the team if no one takes anything away from it? We end up making the same mistakes over and over again.

Of course, as I outline above, I’m talking two different project management methodologies. Agile enforces retrospective after each sprint that can be anywhere from one to four weeks. PMI (or the waterfall approach) has it at the end of the project and the timeline could be weeks, months or years.

I definitely have an opinion on which method I prefer but there is room for improvement on any type of project. For instance, I think teams that use waterfall should adapt the agile process and add a retrospective meeting at the end of each phase of a project instead of waiting till the end of the project. Our agile team should begin making a distinction between Iteration Retrospectives (internal) and Release Retrospectives (external) because there are definitely different goals between the two. Furthermore, we could use more structuring around our retrospective meetings by creating exercises to keep everyone interested and thinking “outside the box.” All teams should be held accountable by adjusting the goals at the end of each sprint/phase and reviewing them at the beginning of the next retrospective to see if they are adhered to.

I’d like feedback from other Project Managers that facilitate these types of meetings. What type of exercises do you use? Do you feel they add value to your team and/or project? When or how often do you think they should occur? Do you ever have a 3rd party come in and facilitate the meeting to have a different view point and get the team thinking more abstractly?

Stay tuned for my next blog where I’ll share new ideas and provide sample exercises for any project team during retrospective meetings.