This instructor meeting will be focused on presenting and discussing the outcomes of the previous development iteration/milestone. Key goals of the meeting are (1) enhancing the instructor’s understanding of your project, and (2) giving the instructor an opportunity to provide feedback to the team.
The instructor meeting will be 25 minutes long and roughly structured as follows:
Because the team meetings are scheduled back to back, time management will be an important concern, and meetings will generally not be permitted to run long.
This part of the meeting is mainly concerned with demonstrating what the team has built so far, and collecting feedback from the instructor. To ensure that you present this part effectively, you must follow these criteria:
Focus on the user. For the explanation of your system to be compelling, the instructor must understand the mind of the user. What is the user’s context/background? What are their goals in using the system?
Focus on the UI. Similar to the user focus, the presentation should focus on the user’s view of the system—namely, the user interface (and your sketches thereof).
Focus on interesting user tasks. Some tasks are more central to your system’s value or goals than others. Given the limited presentation time available, you should focus on those tasks which are more interesting or fundamental to your system.
Avoid getting lost in the button clicks. Feature presentations that devolve into “this button does this, that button does that” tend to lose sight of what’s really important. Thus, when button clicks are explained, it should always clearly be in the service of a higher-level user task or goal.
Don’t step through the list of requirements. The requirements should implicitly become clear through your user-centered presentation of the UI. There is no need to go through your list of requirements.
This part of the meeting is mainly concerned with answering the questions:
What feedback have you collected?
What are going to do, or what have you done about it?
Here are a couple guidelines for you to follow in presenting this part:
Budget time carefully. There is only limited time for this part. Thus, you will not be able to present each piece of feedback in detail.
Emphasize the interesting. Given the limited time, you will want to spend more time on the feedback that is interesting. “Interesting” in this case generally means that the feedback was particularly illuminating for you or will be tricky to handle.
This part of the meeting is mainly concerned with answering the questions:
What tasks did each team member complete last iteration?
Since there is only limited time, you will not be able to present each task in detail.
One (and only one) team member should play the role of meeting leader. This person should present the first two parts of the meeting, and act as facilitator during the discussion part. In performing this role, the meeting leader should follow these criteria:
Be organized and prepared. The leader may use slides and should have well thought out talking points.
Be clear. Make sure to explain thoroughly anything the instructors might not know. (Assume that the instructors know very little for the purposes of this presentation.) Also, make sure the audience is always clear about (1) why the material being presented is important and (2) where the talk is going.
In selecting the meeting leader, the team must rotate presenters such that each team member serves at least once as instructor meeting leader or interactive demo booth operator.
Note that there is an A&B reward for serving as instructor meeting leader. See the Above and Beyond Points document for details.