PO the Buildmaster
Well besides preparing for our 1st sprint and preparing our 1st tasks, remind you that I am also the Buildmaster. Considering no one wanted to be the PO in the first place, originally I had a strong feeling that would be taking on the role of Build Master. Well now that I am both, I want to be extremely descriptive and organized with these documents to make the process of creating this professional looking campaign will come out looking good. Here are some screen shots of some of the documents I have created for myself and the team to keep things collaborative, transparent, and organized. Everything from the GDD. a DM Guide, and even working on a 1st draft of our build.
The GDD has links so that the team can easily access information in the document without having to scroll for a million years to find it. The DM Guide however, isn't necessarily as important as the GDD, but it is something that I am going to be using when I run the final campaign with our Professor at the end of the semester for our final project and it will act as a quick reference guide if I need it. It is set up a little differently than the GDD but has the same concept behind it.
Now it's time to go through the documents of what my team has been working on. This week we had 3 Feature Goal Teams working on their own features. It was going to be interesting as each team had to continuously work and cross collaborate between teams in order to complete there features. Our first 3 features were the Conclusion to our Campaign, the Outset / Catalyst to our Campaign, and the Main Antagonist to our Campaign. You can see why the teams needed to work together in order to succeed, because these features require everyone to be on the same page when generating content.
I have also noticed who is doing work so far and who is trying to skate by. It's interesting to see the motivation people have for their career's. It's also mind blowing to see how going from an important class such as Capstone, where everything was strictly by the books, going to this quality of work ethic, seems relaxing, but honestly it's sad. I want a team behind me that I can count on to get shit done with out having myself or other's hold their hands the entire way. Not only that, but how hard is it to show off the work you are doing or have done on the Google Community? Very hard apparently for these guys.
I warned people that if I was to be Product Owner, that everyone better be on top of their shit, or else I can get very annoying very fast. I am not the type of person to be a complete ass to someone, but I have no problem calling people out and making valid professional reviews about peoples work ethics, attitudes, and body of work. Retrospectives are going to be fun this semester, cause at this point in time, besides myself, there aren't many other rock stars in this group. This doesn't worry me however, as the rock stars we do have, I know will finish this Campaign come hell or high water, regardless of the rest of the team, in case anyone falls off the wagon during this process.
Funny shirt from www.agilescout.com
In the end, I feel like I am doing my job as a Product Owner for this school project. I have provided the team with a Server to collaborate on outside of class with, I have set up a GDD & DM Guide to reference, creating and posting our Build to our Campaign, I have supplied many D&D books to use as references and to get inspiration from, I am always posting comments on everything and giving my feedback, and on top of all of that, I also post Agenda for all meetings with updates. If you can't figure out what your suppose to be doing or don't have any clue what content to create, then I can't help you.
Onward!