Week Number 8 of the Training and Applications looking mature. Thanks for the Support from Kinetech Cloud on the business cases. Four Teams: Kweli, Mangroove, Leptis Magna and Aquila toe to toe in prooving their creativity when it comes to application development considering the variant factors around them to achieve their team goals. Apart from the Technical Skills on Mendix, the Trainees have been trained on Leadership Skill, Communication Skills, Client Engagement, Teamwork and Entrepreneurial Skills. External Speakers came in to brace the Wednesdays with talks on different selected topics of interest including Change Management, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Service Platforms etc. So far so good...and still going ...Two weeks to go and the Trainees passout.
Wednesday the 12th of August 2015 came...... Summer Training came to an end. After the 2 and a half month of Training Summer School came to a closure.
This was the Assessment Criteria:
Development Process
Assessment of Groups.
Assessment of Projects.
And this are the results:
Overall Assessment:
Room for Improvement: While all groups demonstrated their competency in grasping each case, at various times, all teams struggled with a lack of focus. This resulted in disjointed sprints, and new functionality being brought into the application without some of the most critical, straight forward processes being abandoned / not fully completed. When working with clients in the future, it is important to get signoff from them on the functionality you have built, before moving to new features. Bright Spots: Overall, we felt the teams made significant progress over the summer. From week 1 to week 10 we observed better organization, planning, and presenting across all groups. Although the completeness of the application varied from group to group, it is our belief you all grasped the overall concepts of both cases.
Overall Summary / Awards:
1st Place Overall Aquila 2nd Place Overall Kweli 3rd Place Overall Mangrove 4th Place Overall LeptisMagna
Best Project / Comprehensive Application Aquila Best UI Design Kweli Most Technical Aquila Most Improvement Mangrove Best Incorporation of Feedback Mangrove Overcoming Adversity LeptisMagna Best Soft Skills (Client interaction / presenting) LeptisMagna
Construction Case: 1st Place Team Aquila 2nd Place Kweli
Flower Case:
1st Place Mangrove 2nd Place LeptisMagna
Team Assessments / Award Reasoning: Team Aquila (Construction Insights) ● Room for Improvement Bringing a little bit more consistency to the forms / layout will go a long way. There are too many sections / different navigation links (dropdowns, navigation bar on left, etc). This could be polished up to make a much more complete / intuitive application. ● Bright Spots We were extremely impressed how you brought everything together in the end. Specifically, providing the ability to graph only the desired projects the user wants to see was a huge plus! Your focus on informing the user (Status of Gannt chart planning) was impressive and getting the dependencies to graph correctly. You certainly revisted the Case and it showed in the end. You had, by far the most robust graphing capabilities. The icing on the cake was the creative layouts you came up with for the Wish List! For this reason we are happy to announce Team Aquila has won Best Overall Group / Team and Best Construction Case!
Team Kweli (Kweli Constructions) ● Room for Improvement Continue refining your presentation skills and come prepared with a little more & relevant data. It helps the user visualize things in a clear and consistent manner. Soft / presentation skills will get better with more experience. While the design was visually pleasing, we thought you could have leveraged some of the more relevant / telling information regarding a project on the dashboard (instead of burying it deeper within the app). ● Bright Spots We were also extremely impressed how Kweli pulled everything together in the end! You Gantt chart was not complete, but the way you consistently laid out all features and functions across the application was very intuitive and userfriendly. You also revisited the case, circled the wagons, and delivered the value the customer was looking for. For your efforts you came in Second (2nd) Place out of all four groups and were selected as the best User Interface Design. We were particularly impressed with your layouts for capturing data on mobile. You took our feedback to heart (make it as easy for the customer as possible) and it really showed! Nice work!
Flower Case: Team Leptis Magna (Modern Florist) ● Room for Improvement The team needs additional technical experience and to focus on the fundamentals. At times, the group lost focus. We thought the suggestions / ideas you came up with were exactly the type of mentality an entrepreneur needs, but you also need to channel your energy to focus on the task at hand. Overall, great job and way to stay positive, even when your demo does not go the way you want! ● Bright Spots Overall the Leptis Magna team had to overcome quite a bit of adversity to deliver the project. Of all of the presenters, we thought Ahmed’s presentation / soft skills were at the top if not the very best. He was very open to feedback / criticism but the team struggled to get the functionality into the application we were looking for. For these reasons, Leptis Magna came in Second place in the Flower case and 4th overall.
Team Mangrove (Flower Business Management) ● Room for Improvement Continue bringing the full application together. Presentation would have been more compelling with more data and continuing to explain the workflow. ● Bright Spots Overall, your team did the best job incorporating feedback provided by the team. The overall setup and workflow you created for account setup was excellent. The layout was intuitive and you did a nice job thinking about the case. Your event workflow (5 years to 6 events) was a pleasant surprise and nice piece of functionality! Overall it was very nice meeting all of you and working with you over the summer. We hope you enjoyed the cases and working with the Mx business modeler. We are eager to work with a few of you, through Flock of Birds later this year! We hope you have a wonderful rest of summer and stay in touch!
This was compiled by Kinetech Cloud, LLC Team.
I can encourage the students to have passion and motivation in order for them to have a clear inspiration and goal in their life, for the program through my good communication skills.
Am so lucky to have been one of the 23 trainees for the 2014 Summer school. Thought would just learn Programming in Mendix, But it's a comprehensive Package which every person passionate about product oriented software development shouldn't let go. So grateful to FLOCK OF BIRDS & the Other sponsors for generously equiping us with knowledge.. My team was voted by the coaches for having made it with the best application and am so grateful for the "Neaxa Tablet" rewards awarded to us.. This was really a great motivation.. Thanks so much...
Its has been a good precedence so far and we are seeing the fruits. Interviews on the Sample Mendix Project send out kicks off on Monday 11th of May 2015. Participating fellows please come in and show us your Mendix Magic
Do you have a potential business case(s) that we can work with, are you available as the client of the business case, please contact me on the above details and we work this through.