Cyclone SAM

May 14 / Stevie

The edupunk way of saying that is: "We all go round and round in circles until everybody's so sick of it, we agree it's time to stop."

You may lack buy-in to the process from other members of the team

Allen writes: "Functional prototypes are better than storyboards and design specs (much better)." Agreed.

Further, Allen writes: "Disposable, quick and dirty prototypes are beautiful (and we're happy to try again, three times, then we move on)." Problem.

Managers, project managers, writers and editors who grew up in print media tend not to appreciate quick and dirty prototypes; that has been my experience anyway.

You can tell by the responses you get to your first disposable, quick and dirty prototype: "There's a full-stop missing in the second paragraph; This black and white look won't cut it; The colours are off-brand; There are no images, you'll need images 'to engage the learners' they say —like you've not heard of learner engagement.

Plan: Create a feedback form with the questions you want answered. Prepare your team with an on-boarding session. Try to get buy-in for SAM.

Mitigate: Learn from the first prototype (just as you intended to) and push forward —iterate relentlessly.

Nuggets of positive feedback give you false hope

Somebody gets it. Maybe they have experience of rapid development from some other project. They give you the type of feedback you want without being judgemental; they collaborate. This gives you false hope that you're making progress —you probably aren't.

Massive amounts of re-work have to be done before you can version and release

WIth SAM you have to build everything multiple times. Allen suggests three times and then stop. My experience suggests it will take five iterations. Sometimes it feels like the changes will never stop.

Smugness will have to be ignored, corrected, or destroyed

Those old-school print media people will be so smug, thinking they have finally coaxed the idiot LD to a workable solution.