Starting the day

Starting the day, we came in just before 9AM ready for the day ahead. Getting in we grab some water or coffee and log into our laptops at the office hot desks getting set up for the day.

First thing, we go through our Slack messaging and check our calendars to see what we have lined up for the day ahead. After all that at 9:15 it's time for our delivery academy stand-up.

This is a daily meeting where we go through the work we will be doing for the day and take it in turns discussing the different tasks we have in progress. This is also a time for us to request or add any additional tasks to the board. This is a great way to start the day as it allows you to check in with the team and be set up for the day ahead. Our main activities for the day? Running a retrospective meeting and attending a workshop on the discovery phase of a project.

Hosting a retrospective meeting

The aim of the meeting was to discuss the recent set of talks Answer had delivered as a part of Leeds Digital Festival, working out what went well and how we could do a better job next time.

To start the session in a relaxed way played two truths and a lie as an icebreaker to get everyone in a more chatty move. We also ordered in some pizza so that people could eat some food over their lunch break.

We started the meeting by reading from our IDOARRT meeting plan which covers our Intentions, Desired Outcomes, Agenda, Rules, Responsible, Time. This helps get everyone on the same page and outlines expectations for the meeting.

The main questions we asked were,

1. What helped us go forward
2. What held us back
3. how we could do things differently

This sparked a lively conversation, and we wrote down everyone's thoughts so that we could sort through them and report back our findings to the company leadership.

Overall, although we were anxious to run this meeting, we learnt a lot, and it helped me gain confidence to then host other meetings as a member of the academy

Discovery workshop

To finish the day we had a workshop session with our academy guides where they took us through a mock Discovery phase of a project. This is usually done at the start of a project to find out more about the client's problem before we start coming up with a solution.

The mock scenario was a Bakery that needs a new website and so they took us through how you would research their needs and form a set of relevant questions to ask the client.

The session was great, it gave us a condensed feel for how to structure a discovery phase and why we do it. We also were able to feedback on where we needed to improve as well as parts we were doing well and this was really helpful for someone new to this side of things.