It’s been a full-on couple of weeks, evidenced by the fact that we missed our weekly blog for the first time. This isn’t a reflection of a lack of commitment to the project. Our team of four is about to get bigger as we move towards testing.
We have opted for a panel – due to the cruelty of a world that brings us Covid, the week we need to test is the week that our panel breaks up for Easter. We will find a work around, of course. But it is none-the-less, frustrating. But I am ahead of myself.
Over the past 14 days we have made tiny comics to focus our minds on what we need to convey about our innovation. It worked. Mine was ugly and crude, but colleague Sarah showed us why you need a visual artist on the team, by sharing a tiny work of beauty. It wasn’t just the design that was different. Sarah’s key facts placed the work of Collage into context. My scrubby little comic tried to focus on the benefit to young people. Diverse teams, of course, make better decisions.
Remote teamworking can be tough. You can’t read body language in the same way. So, when I attended the OWL session on open learning – I was asked to map out the life of the project. This was illuminating. The vertical axis was the project the horizontal axis was time. I mapped out my perceptions of the highs and low. It looked like a design for a theme park ride. The low point was when the team wasn’t fully aligned. In solving one problem we had seen the opportunity to change the nature of our relationship with the 3,000 people whose lives we touch each year. The danger was that the rush of the new element, looked like it would sweep away the challenge we set out in our bid and that challenge hadn’t gone away. So, the champions for each part of the workflow were getting frustrated. It takes time to work out how to get the best of both.
I mentioned that we were moving towards testing. Well, through some technical wizardry, our facilitators think we can create a working mock-up of our digital solution. This is exciting and leaves us with skills that we would normally assume we couldn’t do, or would outsource. Sarah has got to grips with Whimsical – and our prototype is moving one step closer.
We now know what many of the feature of our solution need to be. We also know that these are going to be bolt ons to the Wordpress website we run. This isn’t the best solution for our consortium – but it is the only way that we can deliver our vision without requiring massive funding.
The trick with bolts ons is to find ones that are used a lot, regularly updated and well reviewed. But the real trick is to know what they have to do and what is nice to have. When you get something of the peg, rather than made to measure, you have to be a cany shopper.
In other news Kemi has pulled together all the information we need for our progress reporting to date (using the Playdeck and Sharepoint). So, the blog may have slipped but we have caught up elsewhere.
So, we think we are creating something wonderful. Now, you may know the story about how a pearl comes to be made. There is an oyster on the seabed and some grit gets into the shell and it irritates it. As it moved around, it is polished and becomes a pearl. You don’t get the pearl without the grit. In team working it is that grit your teeth moment which also allows space to fully absorb the view of the others.
Duncan Sones heads up communications, strategy, and new business development within Collage Arts.
Display image credit: @visualthinkery / @bryanmathers
