This is the second post about Kennesaw State University and working in the Realities Lab. In this article, I will talk about my first year on the job and how everything started to take off.
Spring and Summer
On my first day, I arrived in a suit, partly to dampen my nerves and partly to project confidence. I am sure it did neither, and I was met with comments, left and right, about how the dress code isn’t that formal for my position. I did wear more casual clothing after that, but I believe that this did me a favor by placing me into the minds of all the other staff members at the college of computing.
With the normal on-boarding work of the first few days, I was able to meet with everyone still remaining. To clarify, many people had found other opportunities in late 2020 so a large percentage of staff and faculty had left from the college and new people were in the process of being hired to fill vacant roles. This included the dean of the college and several professors of game design and development (namely the one in charge of the Realities Lab up to this point). That meant the remaining people needed to work closely together in order to continue normal operations, or at least what normal meant with COVID procedures still in place.
While not hugely relevant, I feel the need to mention that this was still before any vaccine had been produced and provided to the public and the earliest one would not materialize for another 2-5 months depending on personal situation.
As a result of having a small community at work, we were all able to bond and communicate well with each other quickly. This was the key for me to immediately start evaluating the state of affairs for the Realities Lab, the department, and the college. Once I understood the ground state, and since I had self determination, I leveraged that to begin solving problems and prioritizing work that I would be able to accomplish and would contribute to the lab’s goals.
I am immensely grateful that I was in such a position thanks to the wisdom and oversight of Dr. Joy Li, who was and still is the director of the Realities Lab, and Kirk Inman who was the manager of IT services within CCSE (the College of Computing and Software Engineering).
As such, I managed to create or update complete catalogues of equipment, projects, documentation and identifying documentation gaps, personnel and team capabilities, finances, and more for the lab within the first two weeks; even while taking time to move the furniture in the room myself to optimize floor space and presentability. This allowed me to move forward knowing that I had full knowledge of the lab and its footprint on the department and college, which is a fancy way of saying that I could make informed decisions and give information on any question or problem brought to the lab. I continued to use everything (including furniture layout) from this time until the end of my tenure with KSU and also coordinated updates to this data with others throughout the college.
After those couple of weeks, I shifted to work more closely with the development team on the active project. I aligned with the client and director on priorities and, over the course of the next couple of months, lead the team to deliver features and fixes that met their needs. I should mention that I was not hands on this project initially since the understanding was that it would be finished before I could be brought up to speed on it. However, as time went on, the need for me to join became apparent and I leapt into the project and learned it as I went. I was able to start contributing quickly and reduce further development time that would have been needed by months.
During that time, I also recognized a need to minimize the digital footprint of the project and lead the effort to do so. We were able to cut the size of the finished project down by around twenty percent. Some other tasks that I started or became the controlling interest in during this time included establishing direct client relationships and taking ownership of the requirements feedback loop, translating client requirements into prioritized actionable work for the development team and keeping the project on schedule, and taking ownership of the development schedule within an AGILE workflow.
Together the Realities Lab team was able to get the project completed by the end of summer in 2021. While the point of this post is to detail my time at KSU, and as such, what work I specifically did, I would like to mention the contributions of the student team that supported the lab during this time as well and give them praise for their work. I am going to refrain from using their names here since I have not gotten their permission beforehand. For more information though, I had created and maintained an iteration of the Realities Lab website that contained the names, positions, and work of past and present members of the lab. Please view an archived version of that website here.
Fall Semester 2021
Once the fall semester had rolled around, we found that we had some time between projects, so I was able to set a new goal for the lab where we created an original project. I was proud that we had wrapped up the last project with enough credit to allow for our team to set our own new direction. I remember the whole team was a buzz with new ideas and excitement over being given a chance to have their ideas make it into the final product.
