Project Overview
Prework
1. Meet Your Team (5 mins)
You should already know who you'll be working with but if not, teams will be assigned now.
2. Assign Roles (~5 minutes)
These are the same roles as last week. Assign yourselves to a role to assume above the role of Engineer/Analyst
3. Review the project
Spend some time reviewing the brief, planning out what your specific contribution as your role
4. Reflect on the previous week
Gather reflections on the previous week to share during the workshop.
Write down at least three pieces of advice to give the rest of the cohort.
Workshop
Prompt trainees to reflect on the previous week's project
Document this in excalidraw
- What did we learn last week?
- What worked well last week?
- What will we do differently this week?
- What won't we do this week?
Explain the structure of these two weeks
This project is similar to last week where you will be building a larger project. The structure remains the same, except now you have two weeks to complete the brief
Provide trainees with the general deadlines for:
- An ERD (by the end of Tuesday of the first week)
- An Architecture Diagram (by the end of Wednesday of the first week)
- A draft of the presentation and tech pack (by the end of Friday of the first week)
Instruct trainees that, like last week, the better their plan is, the more time they will have to create better features
Assessment
Show trainees the assessment criteria
- Code Quality and Documentation
- Pull Requests
- Tests
- Project Board
- Presentation
- Completeness (Is it a complex project and does it work?)
Show an example of a set of Pull Requests completed to a high standard
Presentation
Provide more information around the presentation
- These will be in the afternoon on the last day of the course, beginning around 1:30-2:30
- The presentations must be 5 minutes long
- Every member of the group should be involved in delivering the presentation
- You will have a few practice sessions with PHP / Tech in the second week for feedback, but this does not mean you shouldn't practise in the first week
- Start writing sooner. Presentations that are written at the last minute never look good
Ask trainees what a good presentation is
- It gives the correct amount of detail (not too much, not too little)
- It focuses on the business problem and how their solution solves the problem
- It is data-driven, and focuses on the user journey
- It is well formatted with a uniting theme other than a white background with black text and no images
Outline to trainees what the presentation should and should not contain:
Do include
- Target user(s)
- User stories
- A business problem
- A solution to the problem
- A clear colour scheme and theme
- Images
- A live demonstration of the dashboard
- Architecture diagram
Don't include
- Code snippets
- Specific functions
- Any queries
- Black text on a white background
- Huge blocks of text
- Over the top animations and transitions
Remind trainees who will be watching the final presentations
- Coaches
- Rich
- Rory
- Sales
- Any other member of the SL team
Highlight that many of the people in the presentation will have no context of the project at all
Tell trainees that there will also be a demo-day, where they will be presenting to real clients
Explain that they should be thinking about the presentation as soon as possible, and practice the presentation often. Many groups have lost marks because they hadn't rehearsed until the last few days
Highlight non-negotiables to the presentations
Your presentations MUST have the following:
- Above all else you are Data Consultants, and each of you have taken on an additional role
- You are using impressive technology, tell us about: Terraform, Python, RDS, etc
- Data protection strategies, or a basic understanding of GDPR
Tech Pack
Highlight while the presentation is for explaining the what and the why, the tech pack is for explaining how
Go to the assessment page and go through the required contents of the tech pack
Explain the tech pack should be an appendix to the presentation, and therefore should be in the same style
Highlight the tech pack is to be read through before the presentation to get an understanding of the key components of your project
General guidance
Remind trainees of the software development lifecycle and agile methodologies
The goal here is to create a minimal viable product first, then iterate over it
Advise trainees that they should still be planning out their work in small, manageable tasks, with tickets and (well-commented upon) pull requests.
Suggest heavily that the first thing that trainees should be doing is meeting to go over their plans:
- Booking in their daily meetings
- Setting up the repo (and inviting the coaches)
- Setting up their project board (and inviting the coaches)
- Writing tickets for the project (and assigning the 'do now's)
- Aligning on code quality / styling
- Setting expectations for how they will be working
Explain that the groups that do the best are ones that focus on the simplest, most effective solution, then add complexity afterwards.
Summarise the general guidance for the week:
- Communicate with each other, frequently
- Take ownership of your tasks
- Ask for help sooner rather than later
- Simple is better than overly complex
- Get an MVP first, then expand
- Get the presentation done sooner rather than later