Alpha Presentation
|
This week our Sprint Planning Meeting was hosted by our Second-Year Project Manager, our Scrum Master. The primary task this week was the Alpha Presentation, the Scrum Master delegated the task of writing and hosting this presentation to me, which we did not object to. I personally felt that it was fair to let me handle this task, since it can for the most part feel like Project Managers aren’t contributing enough with the general project. I decided to host a meeting the next day (Tuesday), in order for us to discuss the topics of the Alpha Presentation. I wanted to make sure we all agreed on exactly what I should say. This meeting however, was a failure as far as I could tell. One member did not show up to the meeting, and another was only able to stay for 15 minutes. Yet at the time, I still felt like me and the remaining two members were able to come to a conclusion regarding the contents of the presentation. The next day, I worked on the actual Powerpoint slides, though unfortunately due to some technical difficulties I was unable to properly work on it until later that day. Once the slides were finished I sent them to the team and asked them what they thought. I made a couple of changes once I had gotten some responses, and then I went on to write down what I would say during the presentation. I didn’t finish writing the script until about 23:00. Since Slack automatically disbales notifications after 22:00, I figured there was no point in uploading the script. Especially since making changes the next day could be detrimental to the presentation as I would not have much time to rehearse the changes. The next morning, the day of the presentation, I was asked by team members to send them the script and the final presentaion. When I did, I was met with almost immediate resistance from one of the team members. I was very confused by this, partially since I believed we had already agreed on the contents of the presentaion during the tuesday meeting, but also because the arguments didn’t make any sense to me. It took more than an hour of arguing before I was even close to understanding the root of the complaint. And by the time I think I realised what the team member meant I was very reluctant to changing anything since there was so little time left before the actual presentation. At the end of it all, I think the presentation turned out alright. I didn’t personally think there was anything wrong with the contents of the presentation though, so I would be more inclined to think so. What I did dislike with how the presentation turned out was more connected to the actual presenting. I wasn’t able to rehearse anything during the few hours I had before the presentation, since I was trying to resolve the problem this member had with the presentation. That, combined with the fact that spending the entire morning arguing over slack had left me on edge, resulted in me being very nervous during the actual presentation. I’m struggling to understand what could have been done to prevent this from turning out the way it did. What went wrong? Was it because of the problems during the Tuesday meeting? Probably not, since at that time we did discuss the points and we did agree on them, which is probably th most confounding part of it all. Was I wrong for tying to argue against the complaints of the team member? I can’t see how that could be true. If I didn’t understand the complaint then I didn’t understand it, nothing I can do about that. Should the member have been more clear regarding what was wrong with the presentation? I can’t say for sure. It is clear that this member and I had completely different ideas of what we were arguing about, and I’m still not sure what the member reallywanted changed. I think the best way of preventing any of this from happening would have been to finish the presntation during the Tuesday, so that I could show it to everyone in person during the day before the presentation and we would have had the chance to discuss it face-to-face. Yet how could I have known that would be a necessary precaution, when we were all in agreement the day before? I wonder if maybe there are some thins you simply cannot account for when you plan projects, because this absolutely seems like one such instance. And while this did turn out alright in the end (I think), I’ll probably take more seemingly unnecessary precautions in the future if I’m working with other people, just in case there is a misunderstanding hidden beneath the surface.  |