The brief

This week is all about critical reflection and analysis of my progress on the course so far.

Understanding the brief

The brief this week needs far less analysis than that of the previous weeks. The task is simply to reflect on my progress and formulate a SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based) plan in order to achieve my goals.

A SMART plan is not something that is new to me as I do, although not formally documenting it, regularly adopt this approach with my business partner when analysing the current direction of our company Antiblanks in order to devise time based plans and objectives that help us with our decision making.

My approach

This task has come at just the right time for me, I’ve had an eye opening introduction to the course over the last three weeks and my experience on the App Jam detailed in this post has caused me to deeply analyse my goals and my approach to achieving them.

The brief states that we should identify one challenge and / or obstacle and propose a SMART action to overcome it.

I will start by outlining my long-term goal that I had predefined before joining the course. I am then going to summarise my experience over the last three weeks and detail what I’ve learned and how, if at all, these learnings affect this goal in order to settle on my approach to move forward. Finally I will outline a short but concise SMART plan in order to achieve my goal.

SMART is about identifying goals and then devising a plan to achieve these. The methodology relies on five steps: 1. Making it Specific, 2. Making it Measurable, 3. Making it Attainable, 4. Making it (the goal) Relevant and 5. Making it Time-Based.

My predefined goals

My main goal throughout this course, other than to gain the accreditation of course, is to exit with at least one Intellectual Property (IP) that we can further and bring to market at Antiblanks. I want the course to help reignite my creativity and identify a really strong idea, that I can then apply my years of industry experience to and make a success of it.

Fortunately this goal hasn’t changed as a result of anything I’ve learned so far and to be honest I am quite sure that I won’t diverge from this.

My experience so far

The creative piece in week one was incredibly valuable for me. It fulfilled part of what I was looking for from the course; reigniting my creativity was almost immediate and thankfully I realised that I hadn’t lost it at all, it’s just that I don’t make enough time to be creative. Not having any great ideas was an issue that I had already identified as being a blocker to creating a successful IP.

Looking back, my creativity used to be unstoppable, I would frequently find my imagination running away with itself and I was wondering what had changed. It’s now very apparent that this has been caused by my lack of free time; I am so busy all the time now that my mind is not left to wonder. I don’t think I can fix this, given my responsibilities, but week one affirmed for me that I need to set time aside in my diary to be creative and it reminded me that there are ways to kick start the creativity if it doesn’t come readily.

The platforms and tools task in week two was less interesting - Having been at this game for a long time I know my tools already so from the outset I wasn’t particularly excited about the prospect of delving into this. Saying this, I did enjoy weighing up the options and exploring alternative solutions despite settling back into my previously preferred stack.

In hindsight I do realise that I actually misused this time; I spent countless hours writing a detailed (5000 word +) journal post that, though interesting, did really just stand to confirm what I already knew. What I should have done with this week, rather than looking for alternatives was to trust my experience and spend my time focusing on a technology that I hadn’t yet worked with, but I knew was something I wanted to explore: Expanding my React Native / iOS / Android boilerplate to integrate Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) would have been a much better use of this time; I would have enjoyed the task more and I would have been set to hit the ground running come the App Jam. Also, my experience over this week did highlight that I need to try and shorten my blog posts so that I dedicate less time to writing and more time to the production work.

The App Jam was great, my post on week three goes into more detail about my experience. Though I felt again that I misused the time, the process was extremely useful in realising a few fundamentals that are potentially holding me back from creating a successful IP. One of my biggest realisations was summarised in this quote:

I realised that being in the industry and working on enterprise projects for so long has shaped me into someone who is so focused on the end-to-end management process and on validating ideas for their viability in the market place and value proposition that I have constrained myself and my creativity to a point where my ideas are not able to flourish.

In summary I would say my learnings have identified the following challenges that I need to overcome:

  • Find more time to be creative and exercise creativity regularly
  • Give my ideas some time to grow and flourish before validating them for market viability
  • Skill up on technology that I want to use so it’s easier to start developing with this

My new goals

As I said previously, my long term goal has not changed; I still want to exit the course with at least one IP. However my experience so far has helped me to identify a few areas that I need to work on in order to achieve this.

Finding winning ideas

For this I need to find more time to be creative and exercise creativity regularly and give my ideas some time to grow and flourish before validating them for market viability. As I stated above, once I started with the task in week one the creativity came quite easily. I would say that it took only two hours in order to identify a viable idea. The key was having a theme to work with and in utilising mind maps. So in order to identify better ideas I want to start having regular and structured creative sessions. Each session will be two hours long and will be focused around a theme, the theme will be picked at random in order to encourage new ideas, and after each session and before the next, I will think about the strongest ideas and let them develop in my mind to see what they become.

  • Making it Specific: The goal is to encourage more creativity and find stronger ideas and identify one strongest idea for development
  • Making it Measurable: I want to identify at least six varied strong ideas for selection
  • Making it Attainable: I want to spread this over six individual two hour long sessions and will schedule these sessions at the same time each week, and at a time when I have no other distractions
  • Making it Relevant: The strongest ideas will be selected for development of both of my applications on the course
  • Making it Time-Based: I want to achieve this in six weeks time

Getting ready to develop applications

This relates to skilling up on technology that I want to use so it’s easier to start developing with this. As I mentioned above I do want to explore using AR and VR in my applications. I have some minor VR experience but it’s limited to experiential work I’ve been involved with using Unity and not for mobile, and I have no experience in AR at all. I want to be able to hit the ground running on developing AR and VR applications so my goal here is to expand my current React Native boilerplate to integrate these technologies and implement some of the abstract functionality so that I can easily start to develop an application that utilises both of these.

  • Making it Specific: The goal is to expand my current React Native boilerplate to integrate AR and VR
  • Making it Measurable: I want to have a complete boilerplate in my Github repository that is ready to develop against
  • Making it Attainable: I want to spread this over four individual four hour long sessions and will schedule these sessions at the same time each week, and at a time when I have no other distractions
  • Making it Relevant: The boilerplate will potentially be used for one, if not both of my applications on the course. I can see also that there is an emerging tech week approaching in week nine and I thought that coinciding the work with this might be relevant
  • Making it Time-Based: I want to achieve this in four weeks time

Summary

In this post I’ve given an overview of my experience of the course so far in order to highlight some of the challenges I’ve faced and some of the more prominent learnings. I’ve then gone on to identify how these are relevant to my overall goal and break out some short term goals as SMART actions in order to overcome these.

Conclusion

Critical reflection is something that is very important. Taking the time to regularly assess how you’ve performed over a task is key in performing more efficiently moving forward. Fortunately it’s in my nature to constantly evaluate myself and criticise what I am doing, running a business for some time has served to affirm the importance of this.

One must be careful though, not to reevaluate too often - A common mistake is when you are too agile and in result you flit from one direction to another and nothing ever gets completed, striking a balance between the two is paramount in succeeding ones goals. It’s also important to not lose sight of your long term goals and make sure that your short term goals are relevant in contributing to this.

Staying on track in order to achieve my long term goal over this course is key. Taking the time to assess where I am regularly and whether there is anything I need to change is of the upmost importance. Using SMART actions are helpful because it’s quick to do and promotes creating relevant and focused goals. If managed well then the result is that you stay on track and don’t waste any time heading in the wrong direction.

What’s next?…

The first action point for me this week is to create diary entries to support both of the identified SMART actions to find winning ideas and get myself ready to develop with AR and VR. The second is obviously for me to remember the importance of these short term goals and stick to these rigid sessions.

References

In alphabetical order:

  1. Antiblanks