Activity: Planning communication

In Discord > Team Channels

Today you're going to set up the communication channels necessary for productive exchange. You're going to use Discord for most of your communication.

Configure Discord

INDIVIDUAL

Do the following:

Set your Discord nickname for the server to your real name
If you're willing, set a photo for your profile so people can recognize you. (We realize you might use Discord for other things, and might not want to do this. That's okay).
Make sure you have the Discord desktop/mobile apps installed.
Setup notifications so that you will receive notifications for your team channel ("Notification Settings > All Messages"), and not receive notifications in other team channels ("Mute Channel > Until I Turn it Back On")

Choose a video chat platform

PM leads

Discord has video chat and screen sharing built and it works reasonably well for screen sharing. However, for a variety of reasons, you might prefer something else, such as Zoom, Google Meet, etc., or you might want to choose a backup if Discord isn't working.

Define communication policies

PM leads

Lead a discussion on your team's expectations about timeliness of replies on Discord? Immediately? Within the hour? By the end of the day? Discuss and decide on a policy and ensure
When should you use @everyone to get everyone's attention?
When someone asks a question, who should reply? The "right" person or everyone? You want a policy that prevents silence.
Write all of these down in a new document on your GitHub wiki so everyone is clear on expectations.

Schedule team meetings

PM leads

Meetings are fantastic forcing functions to help you get work done because they serve as social deadlines. Peer pressure is a powerful motivator. Your team should use that to its advantage.

PM: Coordinate among yourselves to choose a time to meet twice per week. All lecture sessions have built in meeting time (nearly 100 minutes of it), including required meetings with the instructor and TA. Are these sufficient? Can all of your teammates make these times, due to time zone variations? Write down the schedule for every team meeting in a document on your GitHub wiki so everyone knows when and where to meet.

Plan the agenda for each meeting

PM leads

It's the PM's job to come to each team meeting with a prepared agenda. This helps make sure that the meeting time is spent accomplishing your team's goals rather than simply sharing funny memes you saw on social media. A great manager will share the agenda at least one day prior to the team meeting to ensure that all team members know in advance what is expected of them. You might write this agenda in your GitHub repository, or decide to store project files in an additional place, such as a Google Shared Drive (as opposed to a Google folder that happens to be shared, which makes permissions more complicated).

The first item on every week's agenda should have the PM publicly acknowledge every team member's individual accomplishments from the past week. If team members want to discuss something, they may write to the manager prior to the meeting to have it placed on the agenda. However, new items can be added to the meeting agenda any time during the meeting as well.

One team member should be responsible for taking notes at the team meeting. Be sure to write down the names of everyone who attended. In the notes, for each item on the agenda, write down the agenda item, a summary of the discussion about that item, and any accomplishments, problems, and TODO items the team came up with during that item's discussion. After each meeting, upload the meeting notes to your GitHub wiki.

To practice the above, plan your next meeting agenda.

Use your new communication policies for homework 1

Resume your work on homework 1. Focus most on the problem you want to address in your design project.