After all of our big tech events, we like to review how things went and identify areas for improvement, even if we felt that nothing went wrong. We always do these in a no-blame way, following the Retrospective Prime Directive:
“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”
Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review
For our reviews we follow a format called The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, where we identify things which went well, things which shouldn’t have happened, and things which we could have done better.
The Good
- The stream from the War Memorial was good, with solid connectivity and clear audio.
- Using an additional speaker at the War Memorial gave clearer, crisper audio for those there.
- Relaying the Act of Remembrance into the Community Centre is appreciated by those unable to join the procession for whatever reason.
The Bad
- We lost our in-church connectivity just as the procession was forming, which meant we had to hurriedly switch to a backup. We were only able to do this because of performance issues earlier in the morning meaning we were in a state where this option was available. We should investigate ways of improving the resiliency of this connection.
The Ugly
- The internet connection in the church was performing poorly at the start of the service, prompting us to use a more adaptive but lower quality streaming process.
- There was a slight mis-timing at the start of the service due to some confusion over flag parties.
- We forgot to disable the wifi on our mobile camera, which led to a drop in connectivity as we left the church.
- We used a radio microphone at the War Memorial, but this wasn’t as reliable as we expected. We should spend the time to install a wired microphone in future.