#idm707

Take the decision to study in a different country is always challenging and more if you don’t have an accurate plan. That was my case when I decided to move to Canada and make a Post Degree. I had a lot of problems with my visa and I came 2 weeks late to classes. After been in Canada for 3 months I have not only improved my english but also my skills by attending classes every week day to Centennial College. However to this you need to have a plan. At the beginning of the course I made a Gantt chart and the following words are my reflection.

How accurate was my planning?

Well I wasn't that bad as I thought it will be. I took my time to check every class in my Gantt chart and I have a little bit of everything. What I mean with a little bit of everything ? I have classes that were really well planed and also classes that were a complete chaos. Some of them, the problem was that I didn't have a specific course outline which made very difficult to plan something accurate. On the other hand I had a very specific course outline but my calculates about the time that I needed to complete every single task was wrong. 

This is an approximate chart representing how accurate my plan was in each course.

Production tools 1

This was the only course that I planed totally right. Probably because I’m a developer or because the course outline was really straightforward. I did every assignment on time and following the structure in the Gantt chart. As well made the Gantt chart was easy because all assignments were similar and due to every week.

Emerging tools 

The schedule for this course was simple. Basically a few tumblr posts and a final project. The only problem that I had to follow the schedule on the Gantt chart was the final project. Is difficult to make a plan for something that you don't know exactly the due dates. Also the outline for the final project wasn't very specific at all. 

  Digital Industry

The plan for this course was very similar to the Emerging tools. Very easy to made and also to follow. The challenging part was the final project. No due date in the outline so was difficult to plan something more accurate for this course. 

Experience Design

I planed this course very good in terms of which assignment was required to do first. Each assignment required the finalization of the previous one. On the Gantt is well represented the connection between those assignments but the time required to finish them wasn't accurate at all. Additionally the final project wasn't represented as good as it could be.  

Writing for Int. Media

Writing for Interactive Media and Experience Design share the same structure. Both courses have an structure that requires the finalization of each task before start a new one. That structure is well represented in my Gantt chart as well as the connection between all assignments and the final project. 

Interactive Narrative 1

No Gantt chart at all because at that time I didn't have an outline for that class. In a real situation the best practice is to update the Gantt chart as soon as you get the information.

Skills for Collaborative Work

My plan for this course was the most inaccurate. Half of the tumblr assignments were made out of the plan. The interview with the leader is something that I had a lot of troubles and the Gantt chart could represent that task in a better way. Lack of emphasis in the time required not only to get the interview but also to do it. 

Video and Sound

The schedule for this course was also very inaccurate. The personal video plan is based to hand a task every week however all assignments were handed the same day. Also was difficult    to made a plan for the viral video presentation without a due date. 

In conclusion if I need to make another Gantt chart I’ll take a few considerations before start doing it.

- Have all the due dates for every single task

- If a task depends of more than one person, talk with all the people involve with that task before.

- Take time to think outside the box for extra tasks that could be part of the Gantt chart.

- Update the Gantt chart as soon as any of the initial tasks planed change.

- If there’s no existing schedule for a specific tasks make one as accurate as possible.

Actually the plan I started with were mostly based on the outline of each course. What I got right was I could easily look at the Gantt Chart to find out what assignments were there for that week. However, the assignment schedule turned out to be very different than what I thought, since situations always changed. Teachers adjusted their assignments due time according to needs. In the case of Jason’s class, he extended the due date because the server had broken down for a few days.

Another unexpected thing was as most of our assignments were teamwork projects, I had to adjust my schedule to work in the group. In fact I could do nothing before we had a group discussion, because I needed opinions or agreement from other group members regarding of a team project.

For time management, it was really important to figure out how long a task was going to take. Some tasks were much more challenging than the other. As a result of the unsuccessful time management, I found myself had a few free weeks in beginning, while being totally exhausted with the heavy homework at the end of this semester.

Reflection on how my team operated

Our team members include Paula, Diego, Ryan, Johnathan and me. For assignment, usually we have a brainstorm discussion firstly. We chose a location and time to gather together, reading through the whole assignment requirement together. In the case of IDM 704, we were asked to analyze and redesign the website City of Toronto. The first step was to find out what was problematic. In the case of city of Toronto, the main problems are content, access and inconsistency. To dig into the problems, we went through the whole website to study website elements, from index, menu, search bar, landing pages to other key pages.

I enjoyed the discussions, whereas each of us contributed different ideas and personal angles. Then we could narrow down the problems to a few main problems. For me, I was a poor writer, so I always hoped that I could used exquisite expression to explain the problems just like what they did. We separated the website into different sections and each of us were responsible for a single section. In the end, the file concluding the discussion will be sent to all group members by emails. We used Google Drive to share most documents. For presentations, we used Google presentations, which allowed us to edit the slides simultaneously. Before giving the presentation, we would have another meeting to combine our works and reorganize the content in consistency. We even had an rehearse for the final presentation, whereas each of us gave a brief speech of what we were going to talk about.

I think this project of IDM 704 was most challenging because we must design our sections individually while we still need to keep everything in consistency. We had to work together closely to decide the style, the format, layout and other design elements for the redesign project. Most of our concerns are placed on how to fix the problematic information architecture. Diego came up of the ideas that we could visualize the design by drawing. I found visualization really helpful to organize our collaborative work. We sketched and adjusted all design elements together, working closely to redesign the menu, index, the overall layout and the navigation bar through the whole website. After the discussion, Diego took the responsibility of drawing a landing page template based on our discussion. So we could apply the template to our own sections.

Things that weren’t working well: for IDM 708, we were required to make a viral video, and we decided to make another vision of the viral video Waffle Falling Over, which hit over 1,900,000 views on YouTube. We finished filming the video quite early but we failed to upload it timely. There were very few viewers and nobody really cared about it at the time we uploaded. We failed to upload it timely largely because we were distracted by our personal video projects, but I think one of the reasons was nobody volunteered to play the role of leader. If anyone kept tracking the progress and reminded us to finish editing in time, this failure wouldn’t happen.

Strengths and Weaknesses of each teammate

Paula and Johnathan were good at writing and speech, Johnathan was in charge of the discussion process while Paula would get us back to key points. Ryan had a sense of humor in expression. Diego was a very collaborative teammate who knew well how to make a balance between different opinions. For improvement, Diego and me had similar troubles in writing. John was very respectful to each of our opinions but he probably could be more critical in discussion. Paula did a fantastic job but she could do better in conformity with team, while Ryan could have a more broaden mind with cutting-edge design.

Personal reflection. 

Working as part of a team is a reality in the digital industry. Much of our school term has been spent working with the same team on a variety of different projects. Like most team based projects in the working world we have had our ups and downs. While some teams will often let themselves be torn apart by disagreements, a big emphasis this term has been placed on trying to learn from our experience. In particular, we have been trying to learn what works well and what creates problems so that we can try to approach team based projects in our professional careers in a smarter way.   While I did learn a lot about my teammates and their specific strengths and weaknesses, I will now spend a little time elaborating on some general lessons I learned that might be applicable to anyone reading this who may be about to dive into a team based project.

     Looking back at all our projects, I think something I would stress going forward is that everyone be present when really important decisions are being made.  As Susan Heathfield describes in her article about teamwork (which can be found here: http://humanresources.about.com/od/teambuilding/f/

team_work.htm), in order to ensure that you are getting the most efficiency out of your team, you need to be sure that everyone is on the same page. From experience, I would say that the best bet is to make sure everyone is around when all the key decisions are being made with regard to a project’s direction.  We faced a few times when there was a lot of confusion because one or two people were not around when a decision was made. The amount of time spent trying to bring everyone up to speed only adds to this frustration so I would probably recommend that even if someone cannot physically be at a group meeting, they make sure they phone in or are present on Skype or via a Google + hangout.

       Another key point that is vital to making sure that a team functions properly is trust. It is hard to build a really strong trust relationship over the span of only a few months, but trust is the foundation for good teamwork. As pointed out by Keith Yamashita (the man who changed the way Starbucks does business), trust is what helps you play to strengths and weaknesses because you know who to trust with what tasks (you can find this article here: https://www.openforum.com/articles/tips-on-teamwork-from-the-man-who-reinvented-starbucks/). Yamashita also emphasized the importance of being able to focus on the incremental goals and not getting lost in the big picture. I feel that this happened to our group on a few occasions when talking about specific things. We would get lost in our discussion and lose focus about what we were trying to decide. The way I would recommend to fix that would be to designate someone as the “moderator” whenever a discussion is taking place. This person is always keeping track of the conversation and if digressions are occurring then the moderator needs to step in. By properly using this moderator, you are helping your team to stay on track with the objectives they need to take care of and take solace in the fact that you are not wasting time.

Working with other people is inevitable in nearly every industry. With the exception of a lucky few, the rest of us will at one point or another, have to collaborate with someone else to get a job done. Happily, my experience over the past semester with my team members has been largely positive! Everyone has adhered to deadlines and the workload has remained fairly evenly distributed. Best of all, everyone has managed to remain calm and respectful to each other. In this case, my gut feeling was pretty accurate. But was this just by chance?

  Teamwork is based the wild card of other people. Will everyone get along? Will they get their work done? Sadly, many of my teamwork experiences have been negative. I can’t count the number of times I’ve sat with my group members and had my heart sink, before anyone has even spoken! I get a feeling in my gut that I’ve just jumped on a sinking ship and only been given a teaspoon to bail myself out. This led me to think: is there a way to predict the success or failure of a team apart from the cruelness of experience?

  Turns out that there is a whole area of scientific study dedicated to quantifying and predicting the success of a team by measuring members biological data produced through communication. By using electronic sensors, the scholars at the MIT Human Dynamics Lab have managed to turn this data into a model for successful teamwork. Their findings, as reported by head researcher Alex Pentland in a recent Harvard Business Review blog article, are quite surprising:

  According to our data…How we communicate turns out to be the most important predictor of team success, and as important as all other factors combined, including intelligence, personality, skill, and content of discussions. The old adage that it’s not what you say, but how you say it, turns out to be mathematically correct. (emphasis his)

  In the case of my team, I can think of examples to both support and contest this fact. For instance, the diverse cultural background of my team members has had a strong affect on how they communicate and this has caused some tension. I have found in difficult during group discussions to listen to what a team member is saying because I find myself reacting to how they are saying it. This has also contributed to some personality clashes, as group members have misinterpreted passion with anger or criticism of their work or ideas with a personal attack. In order to avoid this issue in future, I think that we should have established a simple list of communication guidelines in our preliminary meetings. These rules would’ve helped us to avoid the frustration of miscommunication so as to assure that we were hearing a person’s ideas instead of their tone of voice.

Harvard Business review cites that a common misconception about successful collaboration is that it depends on group harmony. In fact, one of our group’s main issue arose from personal conflict. Different interpretations of what counts as a ‘sufficient’ piece of work in the design process also caused a rift in our team. We all come from different backgrounds, with some having stronger aesthetic skills. While we tried to use the assignments as our guiding principle, our individual interests and experience level had an effect on how we judged each other’s work. Since we all had different benchmarks for what we consider to be a ‘successful’ wireframe, we got caught up in what looked good versus what aligned with our design strategy. Our team members got so caught up in their subjectivity, that they lost sight of the fact that they were saying the same thing. Since we didn’t have a benchmark for good design, this was more a personality conflict and so was much more challenging to resolve. It also didn’t help that the team members involved were both stubborn in their assurance that their way was the best way.

The Fall Interactive Tour is an event that provides emerging professionals the opportunity to get involved with media companies around Toronto, visit them and learn about the jobs they might be offering.

The FTI 2013 wasn’t the exception, the tour was full with energy students from different college across Toronto, media professionals, collaborators and amazing experiences. We visited 5 different companies throughout the tour (Shopify, S-Trip, Taxi, Derooted and Social Game Universe). We also watched presentations and workshops by media professionals from other companies such as EA, Ubisoft, Get Set, Oddly, Asteroid Base, etc to help us gain a greater understanding of  the media industry in Toronto.

One of the more amazing and inspiring presentations that we saw was from Asteroid Base. They are a small group of guys ( Matt Hammill, Jamie Tucker and Adam Winkels) that are creating a very unique indie game calls “Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime”. The entire group started in a complete different path from the game industry but with a similar passion between each other: “games”. The story began at Toronto Global Game Jam 2012 where LIADS starts. The team has been developing the game since then and also showing it to the community, that gives them excellent comments about it. The game is 2 player co-op platformer inside a spaceship and is very active and colorful. Players work together running back and forth between ship control rooms trying to kill the enemies outsite of the spaceship.

During FTI 2013 we had the opportunity to speak with many media professionals from different companies, developers, designers, illustrators, animators, etc but Tim Willison founder of Oddly and sponsor of FIT was one of the most impressive guys at the event. He was always involved in almost every presentation during the tour, participating and giving us his experience about the topic. He’s very social and incredibly friendly to everyone. In my particular case having the opportunity to share with such a successful person is an incredibly valuable experience and gave me the feeling that I’m able to be part of this industry.

The role of a leader is indispensable to accomplish goals and objectives. The ability to influence, inspire, motive and enable others to contribute toward organization success is very important and necessary in today's world. A Leader has to organize the cooperation and assistance of other people that may have different opinions, attitudes, values, beliefs, habits and ambitions, which cause serious problems.

  There are many situations when challenges may arise and the leader needs to face and deal. A big issue that makes the leadership role really difficult is when a situation is changing or unstable. In organizations sometimes times are tough and transitions may occur, when something is about to start, when something is about to end or when something unexpected happens a leader is expected to be in charge, and has to know how to address and solve the situation.

  In order to cope these situations a leader need to be confident, be decisive, be proactive, be creative and be responsible. One issue in leadership is misunderstanding the role; people can look leaders as authority figures, as mentors, as saviors, as models and as inspirers and this in itself brings a set of challenges. They need to know how communicate and share the vision, maintaining effectiveness, look for a common ground, make decisions and face conflicts.

  Leaders can face with attitude problems and personal issues. The attitude that a leader brings to the work floor influences team productivity and for that reason is very important makes sure these problems and personal issues don't prevent exercise leadership. Leaders can feel insecure, when there are tasks o situations that are difficult to face or when they know that maybe they're not very capable and competent.  The key is to not allow this stop you and listen what the people say to your ideas or plans. Ask question is something that a leader has to do, hear different and diverse ideas is really beneficial because there will be at least one that can help solve the problem. 

  Another issue in leadership is the lack of decisiveness. In many situations is really hard to make a decision and make the right one. The leader has to take the responsibility for the consequences of the decision made and that makes it even harder. That is the essence of a leader, learn to make a decision when necessary and understand that living with the consequences is part of the role.

"Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American Dream?" -Homer Simpson