Part two of guest blogger Viqui Dill's story of how The Rough Drafts came to perform at the STC Summit.
Bringing the Rough Drafts band to the 60th Anniversary Party for #STC13 was a big job that took a village to accomplish. This blog post describes our journey as a series of Agile sprints. 10 to be exact.
We've divided it into three blog posts. Here is the second.
Sprint #4: Rachel saves the day!
Weeks go by. We hear that Betsy Maaks has a work conflict. We can't do this thing without the 5th Beatle. On 6 April, something wonderful happened. Rachel Houghton came to the rescue in an email with the subject line Open Jam is on! I don't know what kind of magic she had to work, but I'm glad she did. Now for the next sprint, and time is running out!
Sprint #5: Songlist Gamification
As soon as the good news is announced, the emails and tweets begin flying about a set list. Can other folks sit in with the band? What if they don't know the songs? What songs will we be playing? Well, Agile means Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery, so we got started making that set list. Starting with the set list from #STC12 and polling the band members, we quickly came up with a list of over 50 song suggestions. Everybody had an opinion about each one but we had to quickly pare down the list into a subset of songs that we could pull off without any rehearsal and then arrange them into three working sets.
Google Drive to the rescue!
(Thanks to Muniza Arifin for teaching me about Google Drive.)
We set up a spreadsheet with all the songs in rows and each of the band members in columns. Next, each of us rated each song on a scale from 1 to 10 in the spreadsheet. Top scores (Dead Flowers, Love Me Like a Man, Crossroads) win the game. Lower scores (Little Sister, Wooly Bully) would go in the book in case a jammer wanted to sing them but not in the set list. The songlist was posted on Lanyrd and SlideShare and people could start getting excited about joining the band.
Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery. Yes indeed.
Sprint #6: Karaoke?
Can't we just be taken out and beaten to death?
A few days later, Paul Mueller called with the wonderful suggestion that we combine the Karaoke party with the party. This was a great idea because it meant that we could have both fun activities at the party, appeal to a lot more of the tech comm folks, and have a bigger better party. Great idea, but there is a problem. It's no secret that musicians do not like karaoke. When karaoke first became popular, clubs fired their bands in favor of this easier and cheaper form of entertainment. Karaoke became the serial killer of our paying band gigs. Carrie Oak Key, with three names like a presidential assassin. Karaoke is evil.
Ok, now that I have that all off my chest, I know that some people like it. And I really wanted to ensure Customer collaboration, more than I wanted to stick with the old plan and leave out the karaoke enthusiasts. So we signed up to partner with the enemy for the good of the many.
I want a medal for this. Responding to change over following a plan. Seriously.
Sprint #7: Homework (remote rehearsal)
With a drummer in Vermont, guitar players in Berkeley and Philly, and me in Winchester, we did not have time for rehearsal. But we had the next best thing. We had YouTube. Each of the songs had a link in the spreadsheet to a YouTube video. We could listen, learn, and rehearse from our remote locations.
Self-organizing teams.
Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted.
There was no other way this was going to work. Me and the laptop. We had a date.
Sprint #8: Making a list, checking it twice
Songlist Content Management
Coming up with sets of songs in the right order is kind of an art. You have to start and end strong. You have to give a balance of fast energetic songs, provide space for a few ballads, and divide up songs that sound similar. Then we made song books. Lyrics, chords, TOC, whitespace, font choice, all of the stuff for which we're known. The deliverable was sent as a pdf to my favorite mom-and-pop printing shop in my town, then printed, bound, picked up, and then packed in my suitcase for safekeeping.
Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace.
This is the second post of three. Stay tuned for the happy ending in part three.