GVDS Journal #3: How I arrange teams for the GVDS

The first team of the 5th GVDS, based largely in Europe, Hong Kong and Asia-Pacific

I had a message today from someone on LinkedIn, asking how I went about arranging the teams for the Global Virtual Design Sprint. They were concerned that, since they were in Amsterdam, they wouldn’t find others to team up with.

And I thought… that would make a great journal entry! 😎

Here’s how GVDS teams are arranged

First, we have participants who register fill out a rather involved Doodle form, asking them for their availability the third week of May. Why just that week? Because it’s arguably the busiest time of the Global Virtual Design Sprint, and is a general snapshot into how available people generally are.

There are 120 options (1 hour blocks over seven days) for participants to choose from to indicate their times.

I haven’t found a suitable alternative to Doodle to get this done. If anyone reading this has some suggestions, feel free to post them up. 😁

Once I start getting some schedules in Doodle, I transfer them over to Google Sheets and start looking for alignment. Beyond availability, I have to consider the roles people want to play, their experience levels with design sprinting and the kinds of personalities they have. And… all of that has to blend in a 5–7 person team.

Here’s a snapshot of the last GVDS and how I was arranging those teams:

The columns on the left indicate final team placement and kickoff times. The red/green on the right is a direct copy of the Doodle poll information aligned with each participants’ name.

It’s a manual process that takes some time. I also have to figure out what teams are possible given the previously mentioned constraints.

There’s also last minute changes, signups, dropouts and other logistical aspects of maintaining the list that I have to sanction time for at the end of each day. The sooner people know their place in the greater scheme of things, the better they’ll feel about their upcoming engagement in the event.

Finally, I put everything into some sort of graphical format in Mural. This isn’t really needed, but it’s a nice way of teams being able to wayfind, get to know one another (all pictures are linked to their LinkedIn profiles) and start the process of planning out their kickoffs.

The illustrious Team Aloha, with the event’s Most Valuable Practitioner (Lisa) and several award winners.

Here’s an example of one of our Top 3 teams from GVDS 5, Team Aloha. Nearly everyone on the team were Spotlight Award winners (more on that in a future journal entry) and really came together well. They even created a video to capture their experience in the GVDS.

So that’s how teams come together in the Global Virtual Design Sprint. If there’s anything else you’d like to know about how I schedule things out, feel free to leave a comment or a question and I’ll do my best to answer them. 👍