Design studio

The Jeffrey S. Raikes School at the University of Nebraska is an honors program for Computer Science and Management majors at the University of Nebraska. Retired Microsoft division chief Jeff Raikes, a Nebraska native who currently heads the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is it's patron.

I was at the Raikes School early about a year ago, invited to talk with students about some of our technology initiatives at the police department. This academic year, I had a much more in-depth experience with a group of Raikes Center students. One of my volunteer activities is serving on the board of the Teammates Mentoring Program, a great non-profit that matches up 5,000 mentors for an hour a week with school kids who need an extra supportive adult. Teammates is a client of a team of Raikes School in a year-long capstone class called Design Studio.

The Design Studio team takes on a software development project for a client, and spends the academic year designing and developing the project to the clients specifications. My role was to represent Teammates as the customer. Several times during the year, I have attended checkpoint meetings with the team, where the next iteration of the product was demonstrated, progress discussed, and the work plan reviewed. If I am satisfied with the work from the client's perspective, I sign off on behalf of Teammates.

Satisfied would be a huge understatement. The last checkpoint meeting was Friday at 8:00 AM (this is a motivated group!) and the work is in the home stretch. The product looks great, the functionality is excellent. It is designed to help recruit mentors, match them with Teamates chapters, suggest good potential student matches based on a preferences and interests algorithm, and track potential mentors through the recruitment process. It's going to be easy for people interested in becoming mentors to use, and a big hit with Teammates staff in the central office, chapters, and schools. The integration with Teammates management software is a particularly noteworthy a complishment.

I learned a ton by watching the team work, and by seeing the Agile software development process in action. This process, based on successive iterations of software and continuous incremental development, was something I was totally unfamiliar with. Having worked my entire life in a rather strictly defined hierarchy, the concept of self-organizing teams was not exactly in my toolbox. At the same time Design Studio was developing this product for Teammates, I was involved in a software development project of my own back at HQ (more on that later). These two projects were on almost exactly the same schedule, and what I learned by watching the Design Studio Team certainly was reflected in my own approach to our project.

If you ever hear anyone bellyaching about young people generally, or college students in particular, I hope you'll ignore it. I enjoy high school and college classes a lot, and I'm always impressed with the quality of discussion when I'm invited to various classes several times each semester. But Design Studio is on a different level entirely, and the experience of watching these incredibly talented honors students create was not only uplifting, it was quite the learning experience for me personally--and I am putting what I learned to good use.

Megan, Chris, Karri, Ethan, Callie, Eric, you rock! Suzanne, Jeremy, Nate, Chris, Brian, Doug (the other consultants, coaches, and clients), it's been a  pleasure working on this project. Hope I didn't forget anyone. One more thing for the Design Studio students: I know you're going to read this, and you will make certain your parents see it. That's an order: don't make me find my parking ticket book.