Welcome back everyone,
This week, we had to sell our project. Of course we don’t mean drafting financial valuations and legal contracts! In week three, we had to face our first weekly presentation.
So what are the Extreme Blue presentations? Each week all four teams get together at the Hursley House Auditorium – the oldest part of our campus. We get to present in the most prestigious and beautiful location on site. All IBMers from Hursley are invited to come and see what we have to share, ask questions about our projects and, hopefully, give us valuable advice.
Presentations have a strong purpose – in 9 weeks of sharing ideas to the audience we prepare for the final event of Extreme Blue, the European Expo in Amsterdam. However, before we reach perfection, we need to go through many hours of preparations. Week 3 was our first trial.
We had to spend a lot of time rehearsing our speeches. While each of us is a great presenter, we have very different styles and Extreme Blue pushes us to find our own perfect team equilibrium.
Another challenge: given only 10 minutes, we had to summarise 3 weeks of project work. It was a great exercise in prioritisation of our findings and ideas. Team School Outreach is slowly developing its business identity and branding, so keep an eye on what we will have to show in a few weeks time!
Our other big task this week was designing the application UI. After brainstorming features, we came up with 3 different sets of wireframes. To make sure we keep our users’ needs in the center of the design, we invited them to the office and ran two focus sessions. They gave us a lot of insight into what works, what could be improved and where we went completely wrong – and we are really excited to get some progress with better designs next week.
IBM Extreme Blue 