LBi CPD

2010 saw a range of changes across the business for us at LBi that we needed to respond to in a growing and speedy fashion. L&D as a result cannot and does not sit with one person. Teams are encouraged to carry out their own L&D activities that they see are relevant and meaningful for them. As such we’ve seen a range of things happening of which I’m positively beaming about.

Creative

These guys hold a weekly Friday Fun meeting. They come together, get given a brief and have 20-30 minutes to crack the problem. It’s not business critical, the outcome doesn’t matter, and there’s no pressure on what they produce. So what happens? They unleash their joint creative force and come up with brilliant concepts that’s what. And, importantly, they’re able to take those fresh eyes and apply different thinking to their daily work and produce inspired creative work.

User Experience Architect

Two forms of meetings are held with this sharp thinking team. Mini-mamas and Big-mamas! I could just leave it at those names, because quite frankly they are brilliant. But, let’s not. The purpose of these meetings is to present some inspired findings and insights team members have come across that they want to share with their peers. This isn’t about showing off. This is about finding those things which go beyond best in class. They enter a realm of Jedi like meditation. And what do these guys do with it? Design some of the best insightful user experience formats you’ve ever come across.

Delivery Management

How many project managers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? This lot don’t care about the lightbulb. They care about the team they work with to come up with the plan. They’re not masters of their game for nothing. They have rare insight into each and every discipline across the business. And they have that because they actively seek out information from the business. And what they deliver is often beyond expectations of the client, and certainly beyond expectations of the groups they work with.

Technology

How do you keep a traditionally detail focused group engaged in creative activities? Simples. Include them in all of the above. We don’t let our teams sit by themselves. They blend together by being at each other's meetings. They then come together, take that information and decide – as a Tech group what can we produce? I mean come on, have you seen Christmas Collaboration, Infi-Knit and David’s BeeBeard? They are the folk who made all those happen and more.

This is a guest post from Nick Langton, Head of Delivery Management at LBi Ltd.

-----

We structure the team into bi-weekly project meetings. These meetings are broken into new business lines or services that have come into LBi. It's a chance to feedback and review from sunset reviews, and to disseminate knowledge throughout the department of potential issues or working pratcies that benfitted the project.

We also have a number of brown bag lunches every 2 weeks that allow for detailed descriptions of services and key contacts in the agency to the delivery management team. Other fundamentals such as project planning, risk management, and use of Tempos are also delivered in these sessions.

Underpinning all of this we use the LBi performance review structure to identify 4-5 key company objectives that are distributed to the project team and identify 3-4 personal learning objectives such as development of skills in specific areas such as CMS implementation, mobile app development or financial services.

We train our Leader level project managers (and above) to Prince2 Practitioner qualifications and we have a core team of Agile project manager who are trained in Scrum Master methodology. Currently about 60% of the team have Prince2, and we're looking to raise this 75% over the next 2 years.

This is a guest post from Paul Worrall, Project Manager at LBi Ltd.

-----

I attended the facilitation training session about 6 months ago. This has helped greatly across all team meetings, especially when gathering info from a broad project team.

A specific instance relates to agile project methodology. When planning a sprint (iteration of work) we took a day to plan this. The morning session was to review the product backlog and select user stories for the upcoming sprint. The afternoon was used to place hour time estimates for each discipline (qa, int dev, java dev, design etc) for each user story. That information was used to check we had correct resource levels, had not over promised and was used for the sprint burndown chart which tracked progress. Both sessions were attended by all team members and various client stakeholders.

The afternoon session had traditionally been trawling selected user stories and allocating hour estimates individually. This involved a very dry session with one user operating computer to insert agreed hours. This would take 4 hours on average.

After facilitation training I altered the session. I split the team in to smaller teams, gave them post it notes and asked them all to write up the individual hours for each discipline. They then reported those back to the other teams to validate as some teams did not have all disciplines included. The wider team were able to suggest if estimates were too high or low or correct.

This is a guest post from Dr Simon Gill, Executive Creative Director at LBi Ltd.

-----

We couldn’t continue to develop great creative without investing in our staff and continuous personal development. Fact.

The World doesn’t stand still so we collectively need to improve and continually reset the level at which we feel creative excellence can be achieved. And we can only do that by operating as a connected group that looks to develop its strengths and address its weaknesses.

So how do we do this?

First of all we do this by building a strong team dynamic. The Internet Age is not about the lone star, it's about the blended team bringing their individual skills together to achieve the impossible.

We help facilitate this by having a regular team meeting in where all members are encouraged to share their ideas, experience and current work. We call this Friday Fun where everyone is encouraged to provide thought provoking ideas to produce innovative solutions to possible clients problems, in rapid time. By using various techniques we help stretch team members and jolt them from thinking in certain ways. The ideas are used across our clients and our recent campaign for Macmillian Cancer Support, the Infi-Knit is a result of one session.

In addition we run bi-weekly sessions were team members share their work with their peers, justifying what they’ve done and learning from the feedback of others. It works to continually challenge what people are doing and how they can improve that.

We also run a series of training courses that address core craft skills; such as Art Direction, articulating ideas, presenting the idea and brainstorming techniques. These courses help raise the experience of the wider team and provide greater incentive to be more creative on regular work.

This is a guest post from Paul Carvill, Head of Interface Development at LBi.

-----

LBi actively encourages blending between the disciplines found in a digital agency — it's what sets us apart. Developers, creatives, client services and user experience architects work together in truly meaningful ways, and, over the last year in particular, have had a valuable dialogue and, going further, have started to really understand the challenges of each other's roles. Digital is a fast moving business, and keep up with the daily march of progress requires a strong culture of learning, acceptance and compromise. Working closely together in the way we do increases communication, eases the burden of knowledge transfer and reduces the likelihood of one team producing a square peg when the other team has a round socket.

Here are two examples of how LBi provides an environment which supports and indeed necessitates self-driven learning.

LBi Pulse is an in-house application we give to every LBi employee, which gives them the opportunity to make a continuous statement about how they are feeling on a number of work-related issues. It runs on every computer, sitting in the background ready for you to update whenever you like. It uses a technology stack which we had never worked with before, but given a tight deadline the developers were encouraged to dive in and produce whatever they could. We chart the aggregated results of everyone's voting patterns, but it also exposes an API which allows anybody in LBi to create their own visualisation of the data. As you would imagine, this implicit widening of the team gives us a much greater change of creating something which people are happy with and more likely to interact with.

The Kiosk project was a week-long sprint to build a working prototype of a touch-screen kiosk to sit in a retail environment. None of us had ever worked on a kiosk before, and it has considerable limitations. Luckily, this meant we were all in the same boat, so we could disregard preconceptions out the door and get down to learning how to build this thing. Creatives and techies set up camp in the LBi basement and threw the usual rulebook out the window. Working fast with a hastily assembled touchscreen, we worked together to discover everything that is bad about touchscreen interfaces — small controls, screen clutter, slow response times, superfluous information, ambiguous touch states — and made a beautiful, big-buttoned, attractive interface that was a joy to use. The client loved it, the team had been on a journey together and we'd built something entirely new.