This week marked the start of our internships at Made by Many. It has been a week packed full of new faces, new information and excitement for what we are about to embark on. During the week we had lots of induction talks teaching us about the company and how we will be working here. In between the talks we were able to get started with the project. This involved getting stuck into research to understand the problem and visiting Westminster to meet the client and learn more about the project (not to mention a quick team photoshoot with Jo in front of Westminster Abbey).

What we did

Briefed on the project and started our desk research. At the start of the week we were briefed on the project and how we would be approaching it. We then dived deeper into the problem through desk research to try and fully understand what we were going to be working on.

Met with the client and created a project charter. We visited Westminster to meet the Predictiv team. We had a very long conversation with them, which both helped fill in the gaps from our desk research and brought up more questions. With them, we created a project charter to outline things like what the project is, why there’s a need for the product, their expectations of us and the risks and assumptions tied to the project.

Integrated with The Many. Over the week we met loads of new people across the company, through presentations and workshops, at the feeding ground (the kitchen) and at the Summer party! We are all very much enjoying the family feeling in the company and are excited to get stuck in.

What we learnt

Storytelling. It was extremely interesting to learn about how MxM use storytelling in their projects to get clients onboard with their ideas. We are looking forward to documenting our whole process with lots of photos to help create and tell a convincing and meaningful story at the end.

Sprints and Agile. Working in an agile way was something that we all had only small bits of experience with. Doing a mini retrospective allowed us to appreciate the value of this method. Seeing how this new approach could work for us in this project is intriguing and we are excited to implement it into our teamwork!

Working in Teams. Being (re)taught how to work in a team felt strange at first when we had all worked in teams before, but the value of doing this was made really clear and we are really happy to have got a lot of things out in the open already. Doing this at such an early stage is something we hope will allow our project to be as successful as possible.