Matt's 2nd Personal Commentary

This class has dominated my time like no class before it. I've met will at least some people in my group at least four times this week. Over the course of the week, we have prepared for a presentation, finished off the last interpretation session, nearly finished the affinity diagram and started consolidating.
Preparation for the presentation was a little rough as we had not done the affinity yet, and therefore didn't have a board understanding of the data as a team. For times sake, I offered a number a categories that I use to think about the data, and the group liked them a lot initially. This became problematic very quickly because people have different boundaries for categories, and they did not have examples in front of them to support my personal division of the data. I knew we were a attempting a verbal affinity in reverse, something the book warned against, but I found it to be an excellent lesson in sticking to the process the book recommends, or at least not doing something they warn against. There were however no other options at the time as we did not have the time or materials to get the affinity mostly completed. During the presentation, I learned the importance of having well made slides and a working computer. People that spoke before me said somethings I was planning on saying, so I had to modify my bit. I found that I forgot to say a few points and added a few new ones. This could have been remedied by presenting a slide with all the points I wanted to cover, but I did have that in the first place as one person made all the slides and then the team slightly modified and assigned them. In any future presentations, I'll try to have each person create their own slides and have the power point on 2 or 3 laptops.
On Thursday, the team started the affinity diagram. In some logistical confusion, two team members met in the morning while the whole team met in the afternoon. Although jumping into the affinity half way through can be daunting, the two members were very productive, as is common when we meet in groups of 2 or 3. I created affinity notes for my two users, and helped clean up the organization of the diagram. Aside from trying to understand the half of the affinity I didn't help create, as a team, this was one of the smoothest as most revealing processes we have done yet. Some team members wanted to start adding categories in the middle of the process, but I reminded them that it's suppose to an inductive process and that at first every note needs to be placed with another note, only then should we start categorizing. This was met with little resistance as we just had to keep doing what we were doing, and we found the whole process rather engaging. I do wish there was a program that did affinities as getting access to our affinity on the weekend proved impossible, and I would like to use the process in other classes and situations.
Friday through Sunday we met a number of times and finished off our last interpretation session and begin consolidating. Our first attempt at consolidating went somewhat well, but when everyone needed to head home, there was a feeling that something was missing in our flow model. On Sunday, I met with Brian and Andy, but the one with the flow model we had been working on did not show. Knowing that the flow model was incomplete, I recommended that we try and bang out the flow model how the book says it should be done. They thought it was good idea, so I divvied out the flow models and we followed the steps in the book. We did re-cover some ground, but we learned a much faster process and a few ways to tweak it to suit our needs, and Brian created a simplified consolidated model with few things written in it to aid his own thinking. Andy and I really liked this idea with addition of side reference with the all the roles, responsibilities, and problems. I plan to apply this process to all future consolidated models and the diagramming technique to at least the cultural model as we move as quickly as possible through consolidation and onto developing our design ideas.