Get Creative is an annual activity where we work in a different way from our usual style to produce something that is a little bit different, but still useful to the University community.  Last year we produced Flat Out, a Facebook application for students; this year we have produced In Pictures, a way for people to share their photos of University life.  Because we have tried out new ways of working, we thought it would be good to ask everyone in the team what they had learnt about  either the way we work together as a team, the way we do Get Creative, or about building applications.

Yvonne

• Last year’s Get Creative project was done over one week; this year’s was done on four consecutive Fridays.  This spreads the experience out for longer, and means we come back fresh to our other projects.  So this seems like a better way of doing it.
• We have got even better at integrating third-party tools (JQuery, PhotoSmash, WordPress) into our applications to make a seamless user experience.
• We have found out that we really are creative.
• We have got better at wireframing.
• We have worked on giving our new application a consistent personality and look-and-feel.
• We have gone out and asked students what they would want from a photo uploading application
• It was good that we brainstormed the ground rules for Get Creative and then voted on them

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (a creative person with a hat)

Liam

• has found out that he likes telling people what to do and wants a “bossy hat”
• enjoyed breaking out of the day-to-day routine and having a recharge
• enjoyed working more closely with the developers

Alison

• It’s OK to make snap decisions on what we can’t do
• The team was more enthusiastic and motivated

Anil

• learnt to use Balsamiq (wireframing software)
• enjoyed working with others and had fun

Andy M

• It was quite a challenge just building the application on the live site without using a test development environment
• We didn’t do any documentation as we went along (due to time constraints) so we might have to “reinvent the wheel” on subsequent projects

Tom N

• It’s important to have a decent development environment
• Talking to users is not too time-consuming and it’s valuable
• It’s fun and flexible to build stuff as we go long

Tom T

• learnt more about using WordPress and Wordpress plugins
• thinks that it’s been good working one day per week on the project because we can focus on getting a lot done during that day
• but also thinks that the downside of this is having to spend time remembering where we had got to the previous week

Andy S

• We need to be a bit clearer on what we want to achieve from the outset
• The Product Owner needs to be present at the start of the project
• Doing things differently is fun
• Selecting our own project was good for motivation

So it seems that everyone enjoyed the project and learnt something about the tools we use or our team process.  We also stretched ourselves and got involved in activities that we might not normally do.