Summary
The team finalized the structure for tomorrow's meeting with George, focusing on client onboarding approach and discovery plan walkthrough. Meg will open by explaining progress since last Tuesday, including workshop completion, Confluence setup, and ways of working establishment. The meeting will cover client onboarding first, then move to detailed discovery activities.
For the discovery portion, each team member will present their specific deliverables and outputs in this order: Meg, Ed (strategy), Sneha (design), then Mikul and Varun (development). Each person should explain their outputs, AI experiments planned, and fallback plans if experiments don't work. The team will reference the project plan discovery phase throughout.
Important guideline: Team members should avoid raising new concerns or disagreements during the George meeting unless absolutely crucial to the project. Any issues should be communicated via Slack side channel or discussed after the meeting to avoid confusing George. The priority is maintaining team alignment over perfection.
George wants a detailed list of discovery activities including timing, ownership, and output descriptions. The meeting should not spend a full hour on discovery - it needs to be a quick snapshot. Meg will walk through the two-week discovery process at a high level, explaining what happens start to finish.
Each team member will explain their component and template mapping work, describing 3-4 key outputs they'll deliver and how they'll achieve them. For example, Sneha will explain working on component/template mapping to produce Excel and Figma outputs.
Immersion sessions and shadowing: Beyond the planned workshops, the team will need additional time with key stakeholders through "shadowing" sessions rather than formal workshops. After the main immersion session, the team will identify specific areas needing deeper dives and arrange ad-hoc sessions with 2-4 people as needed. The approach will be: pre-read materials, immersion session to clarify, then targeted one-on-ones for detailed technical dives. Karim emphasized the importance of deep technical dives for the migration to avoid losing functional aspects during the lift and shift.
All discovery documents are bookmarked on Slack for team access.
The team is creating an interactive onboarding experience for Thursday's client kickoff. A link will be sent to the client ahead of the meeting covering: welcome message, team introductions, scope overview, and project running structure.
Team introductions: The document will include fun Australia-themed content, with team members sharing what they'd like to do in Australia (or have done if visited). Sneha will create Australian-themed designs of team photos to make it more engaging. The team section will also include core client-side people.
Interactive ways of working session: Instead of pre-filling all project information, the "how the project will run" section will be completed interactively during Thursday's meeting. The team will present their assumptions about ways of working (meetings, cadence, reporting, project tracking tools) and confirm with the client what's possible. This approach ensures mutual understanding about the small time zone overlap (9-11am their time is 3-5pm team time). Karim noted this interactive approach is valuable to avoid unrealistic expectations on either side.
The finalized ways of working will be sent back to the client as their official project onboarding document after the meeting.
Client dashboard: The team will not share the client dashboard before Thursday's meeting - it will be shown during the meeting as the "one source of truth," with any requested changes made before kickoff.
The meeting will include space for the client team to participate and share about themselves, helping the team understand their personalities and working styles.
The team needs to document AI experiments more formally before the George meeting. Meg will create a table with columns for function, experiment description, and risk management/fallback plan.
Ed suggested framing AI experiments as group efforts rather than individual initiatives, particularly for the shared "project knowledge brain" that will benefit the whole team. Major AI experiment areas include: project knowledge, content migration speed, and Figma/design system work. However, Meg emphasized the importance of everyone documenting their individual experiments first, which can then be grouped for George's presentation.
Key principle for AI experiments: The project plan will not change until AI experiments are proven to work. Everything must still be delivered by January on the current timeline. If experiments fail, fallback plans include manual workflows, which Sneha noted would affect timelines and require more hours.
Meg will have Claude summarize the completed experiments table visually for George, with detailed information available in Confluence for offline review.
Figma access: Sneha has edit access issues - the client gave edit access, she duplicated files, then they reverted to view-only. She still needs brand guidelines to obtain font files.
SharePoint access: Not yet fully resolved. There are three Figma instances to track.
Component mapping sources: The team identified four different information sources: live site, Confluence, Figma design system file, and onboarding deck. Mikul shared a component list based on Confluence, which the team is treating as the source of truth for component names. However, Figma is not built-to-spec according to Ryan, so the onboarding deck may have better indications of what's actually on the live site. The component list still needs live site mapping once source code is available. Ed noted discrepancies like components called "three column" that can actually be one, two, or three columns based on CMS toggles.
The team agreed to focus on Confluence data going forward, as it has more detail than their earlier discovery work using Aircrawl.
Meetings scheduled:
Meeting cadence with client: Daily stand-ups, weekly status meetings, and monthly steering committees. The team needs to clarify who from the client side will attend daily stand-ups and whether it's just for discovery or ongoing.
Team composition: The core team shown to the client won't include everyone (like development team in India), though they may interact later. Other team members exist but the client will primarily work with the core group.
Varun mentioned needing to push back on other project meetings to focus on this project, awaiting hour assignment from Meg.
Notes
Transcript
the clientsAnd what kind of fun way?
Will we come back to that point you just said in terms of how you're handing over what, who's gonna run through what? Because I think that's not super clear in terms of what material as we go through. Like, is that like, you know, like within your file, we can come back to it if you want to.
Okay. Yeah, yeah.
No, no, let's come to it now. So what George has said on his thing is that he wants a detailed breakdown of discovery. So ideally, in my head, what I would be recommending, we obviously don't have a full day, it's only just a quick snapshot for George, but I would basically be walking him through what would be happening start to finish. And then when it comes to your output, I would just be explaining that I'm going to be working on a component and template mapping.
exercise this is what So it's output to output, basically. So, you know, Sneha's got like, I've got two outputs. It's this and it's this. And I'll be working on this this way. This is how I'm going to work with the team. And I'm going to be diving into this, this and this.
And I'm basically going to produce something that looks like one Excel and one Figma. Yeah. You know, something like that. Right. So each of us are diving through what are the three or four outputs that we deliver at the end of discovery? And how are we going to get to that point? Is that right? Yeah. Okay, cool. So probably you need to see from us what the list of those attributes are. And then how would you have us, what would Georgia actually be looking at as we're going through that?
The meeting's got lots to the agenda so don't want to spend a whole hour on discovery. All that George wants is do we have a detailed list of discovery activities and when we're doing them and who and just describing a little bit of the output. That's it, make it that simple.
So that detailed list will be on your file?
Yeah, on my list because I've wrote down everything that we've said. Okay, cool. Can you just bring that up a second? This one? Yeah. Okay, cool.
All right then. Could we group them? Even if it's not like a, maybe just, or even label it like this if he was talking through it or something like that. Yeah, I can do that. That's fine. Just a simple...
Just in case there's any discrepancy around what Baruna's speaking through and what I'm speaking through, because...
Yeah, that might help.
Okay. Oh, and Sneha, go ahead. Sneha, you had...
A question?
So this is supposed to be like a walkthrough of the overview or the plan of the deliverables and the process that we are using right now. Are we supposed to like take George through like the work as well, like some of the screens and stuff? Like that's not it, right?
No.
you Okay.
So if he wants to see that in a separate meeting, he can do.
But the main thing is, is that we need to show him that this is what, treat George a bit like he has no clue he's the client.
We're trying to explain to George what we're going to be doing in discovery. So I can obviously kick off and explain the two-week discovery in a high level. But then each one of you needs to explain what deliverable you're owning, what output it's going to deliver, Again, that's why you're going to talk about the AI as well, what you're using AI to speed it up.
Good day.
Okay.
So just to do with the order, it will be me.
We'll do EdNet because Ed's around strategy. We'll then do Suneha because you can do the design and then we'll do Meekle and Varun.
Yeah.
So in that it's here are all the outputs, here are the AI experiments that I plan to do, and here's my fallback plan if those experiments don't work.
Those are the kind of three things that we do on each.
and during which we'll just be looking at the project plan discovery phase. Yeah. Okay.
So Ed had this point on Friday as well. So thank you for raising again. What I'll do on the project plan, I will mention to the client that we're not asking for workshops or immersions. Ed had a good example to call it shadowing. So I will explain to the client that there'll be like a big immersion session where it's like two hours.
But then after that, we'll just need time with maybe key people like who does your deployment, who does your QA, and we'll just shadow them and ask questions. And we'll probably be able to determine that of how many we need when we've done the immersion session, because the immersion session might actually give us quite a bit.
you would just document. And then from that, I think we feel like, okay, cool. So it seems like those problems here, here, here, maybe we need a little separate sessions for each of those three things. Maybe there's two people involved in one of those things and four people involved in two others. How are we going to organize that? We kind of like arrange those a bit ad hoc, but we basically need to get them done in the immediate days after those sessions. And I would think that most...
immersion sessions and kind of shadowing practices will be basically following the same thing. Pre-read immersion session, to clarify and then any like specific thoughts like one-on-ones and kind of like detailed dives into you know how you do a rollout do you want to basically very you know if they've got a rollout happening do you want to just be watching that rollout as it happens and they're talking through how do they do that do they have a bridging call between six different partners what you know like what's that kind of experience like and you probably learn and observe a few things in terms of how to improve so yeah that kind of stuff will kind of leave us open and it might be after we read a little preview Like actually everything is super, super clear and we're like, you know, like days ahead of what we thought we'd be.
We'll try to deliver on time, of course, all the discovery items. But that's where my point right now is that good that we have the coverage. I just want to make sure that we call it out explicitly because from a tech perspective, because it's a migration and it's a lift and shift, we want to make sure that we don't lose any functional aspects of it when we are moving the systems.
I've books. Yeah, I've bookmarked them all on Slack. So if you ever need anything, and this is for everyone, they're all bookmarked on Slack.
There's a few things that won't be bookmarked like the one I'm sharing right now because it's not finished. Once we all agree we'll do it, then it'll be bookmarked.
All of that is kind of not separate points to me. It's all one section. So what I was thinking we would do with the client is, We send them this week just a bit of a link that basically really, really simple that we spoke about. The previous version was quite high, was quite low level.
That basically just says, welcome, welcome to your onboarding. You know, they have who the team is and, you know, we can make it fun here.
We can have a quote of like why we want to go Australia or something like that. So they have the team. They have what we're moving. We've got, here's how the project, We're going to have a daily stand-up, a weekly status, monthly steering committee. Your one source of truth is the dashboard that we've made explaining how all of these things work and then just what's coming up.
We just explained this in a little bit more detail and then we talked them through discovering and that's the meeting. It's basically welcome, that onboarding pack discovery and that's what we would do on Thursday Just going down to...
No, this is just a core people. Okay, cool. They won't be speaking to other people though. Oh, okay.
I don't think they'd be speaking to a deaf in India. They might later. Okay. Yeah, for that we also need to discuss about the resource in the Yeah, so we're not going to solve that by Thursday or not. We're not sure about meeting. Maybe we should just label it as the fact that there are other people in the team, but these are the main cases they need to learn and talk to. Um, I think we need to build in.
And is it George who will get in or is it us? I'm going to book it in after this, Karl. Okay, cool. What I would think to do is design in like a game or something, but basically probably for George's session tomorrow, just leave a section on their team, people behind the project. This isn't a one-way thing. We need to have space for them, I think. now that we're talking about it. So if we just kind of like add a little space of like, you know, like tell us something about yourself, but if we're basically doing it ourselves for estimates or of like you know what was the best holiday you had or what was it you know like whatever right some sort of thing that we can invite them to kind of participate into Um, because we're trying to tease out what kind of people they are, what their what their personalities are a little bit and how we can work with them.
Cool. Then maybe with how the project will run, we need to, if we've got meetings, for example, who's coming from their site? Is that a daily stand-up with them and us, and is it just for discovery or afterwards? I think we need to make it more conversive. So we're sort of like inviting them to participate a little bit, right? So, like who's there from our side? Who are we expecting there from their side?
And it might be handy to know kind of like of all the stuff they've given us, you know, like, Actually, I don't know if this is super tricky, but basically, listening to what they've given us, I'm like, tick, tick, got access to SharePoint. Not yet. Maybe we've not fixed it by Thursday or something.
There's multiple three, add.
Three fig ones, yeah?
I've already emailed and they gave me edit access.
I duplicated the files and then they reverted it back to view only.
done But I still need the brand guidelines for obtaining the font files and just the brand guidelines in general.
like our whole project RR type things. Just I think alluding to the fact that we've got a two-hour crossover time difference.
you know, like on 9am to their to 11am is there 3 to 5pm? Should we do that against meetings? It's always going to be this.
Should I change the whole of how projects are run for it to be a bit more interactive where it's basically we're making our ways of working? Yeah.
So what if this link was sent ahead of the meeting on Thursday, but some of the information wasn't already filled in, but it's really clear on why it's being filled in. So they get the welcome, they get the team and they get the scope and where it says how project, run that's where it's a complete interactive session where it says the output of this will then be sent back to you for your project onboarding because we're filling in the ways of working together so basically we'll have our assumption on what we want and we can confirm in the meeting is that possible or not and then they'll get it sent back that this is your project onboarding and this is it's finalized so the meeting on thursday is intro and defining our ways of working We read for the client, which we get George to sign off tomorrow, is this link.
and that you know ways of working or basically how we will run the project it is good that it is interactive because we know that it's going to be very small overlap But I think that being understood together on a meeting is super important by the client as well. I mean, there should not be any unrealistic expectations from any side. So I think having that as an interactive session would be nice.
Okay, so what I'll do is I will change it so it adds on the core people from their side as well.
If everyone from this team can send me just a sentence or two of like what would you want to do in Australia if you ever went? If anyone has been, then maybe tell us what you've done. I don't think anyone has been. So just tell us something that you would love to do in Australia so I can add it on here. And then I'll change that whole section to be more interactive and I'll add, to what we have access and what we don't.
I think we're talking about ways of working. So this is pretty fundamental to ways of working.
So in the meeting, just say that we've got one source of truth that we'll show you in the meeting. And if you want any changes on it, we'll do it ahead of kickoff. So we won't share this in the meeting. I mean, we won't share it before the meeting. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
So just what we're sending to you is what we would like to do in Australia and maybe just Like what would be your top three to five things you'd do in Australia and why?
Could we, Sneha, how difficult would it be to make nice designs of us, our typical pics with like an Australian theme to it? Like I could see Varun, the picture of Varun with, you know, crocodile dundee, He's got the nice big jacket.
Maybe we could AI make more just to like a big room.
Yeah, let me try something.
All right, so let me work with Suneha to see if we can do anything from a design point of view and make it fun.
I'll fix this bit and then that's covering the meeting on Thursday and the who we are section, the detailed discovery. I'll finish it off and you guys can sign it off. The only other thing that I think we've not done yet yet that I think we just need to do quite quickly.
I don't think... George has seen just a detailed breakdown of the AI experiments in a really simple way. I'm just thinking we just do a really quick separate table for him of the function so dev here's dev here are the ai experiments we're running and this is our fallback plan um so i already asked you guys to do this but rather than talking through it it might just be good just to put it on like a confluence page already um so we've got it for um So maybe down here I can add.
A new... We can just basically add definitely So table is function.
We will. Manage risk and fall back. So example, for example, A sample would be... So example me equal, for example, you are... Give me an example of your AI experiment again. Can you just reel it off for me as a description? Like I...
Because, like, this, I bring that we're all sharing from is something that we should like, that should be a, like, like a single high that benefits us in the whole project team. And it might be people will set it up, but basically we're all going to be using that to query like, because.
I mean, basically, project knowledge is one big AI experiment.
you know, like, Uh, Content migration speed is one big AI experiment. Figma and the design is one big AI experiment. And then Um, Sorry, carry on. I'm just making... I think I was going to say what I've already said. you know, like content migration is one and development Figma is another, but is it, That's the end one, I'm not too sure. I just feel like it would be stronger a stronger case to George and to the client, well, particularly to George, right?
So I think it would be really helpful if everyone can start documenting their own, then ahead of the meeting tomorrow, we can kind of group it for George.
If you can fill it in ahead of the meeting. And what I'm going to do is once you guys have filled it in, I'll obviously get Claude to summarize it for George in a bit more of a visual way. And then if he wants to go through it in more detail, he can do it offline using this link. Is that okay for everyone?
So, Qualla will do that in a separate little file, right? So, basically, our contribution is to Confluence and Qualla will make it pretty onto a separate file that you'll flip to during this presentation. Yeah.
Let me just double check. So who we are and what our roles are in the plant project, high level. Okay, cool. Okay, so just to confirm then, I want to start off the meeting with George.
I want to kick off the meeting and I'm going to say, George, I'm not going to go through everything today because we can deep dive in deeper sessions. But since the last meeting that we had last Tuesday, We've since had a workshop. We've started creating all the confluences. We've created our own ways of working. We did a discovery meeting. And what we're going to show you in this meeting today is how we're going to onboard the client and what discovery looks like. Okay, so I'll kick off saying that. I'll then start off with the onboarding part while explaining to the client of how it's going to work.
And then we'll go on to discovery.
And in discovery, we will explain the detailed activities of how it's going to work. We'll hand over to each of you. You cover your own area. And then we'll leave. We'll end it with the AI migration notes. Is that clear for everyone?
It's more of a question. So since we're talking about fallback, I'm using AI as like an acceleration layer, right? For acceleration and extraction. And this is replacing like a manual audit that usually happens before or design the, you know, start working on the design system. So the fallback is, you know, manual workflow that would involve like manual audits and component mapping, token extraction, stuff like that.
which would mean like it would affect timelines and set up like the timelines that we have right now with AI. AI led design system would be different from a manual workflow. So is that okay? Like, I just wanted to like flag that it's different in terms of the hours. Yeah.
So, so the, the, So the fundamental principle for us and the client right now is that until we're certain, until we've got concrete, the project plan is not changing.
We are still delivering everything by January. Nothing has changed. Until we feel like concrete, that we've sped up X, Y, Z, then we're not going to change the project plan. And it could be for something like the design system, we've not actually sped up the overall timeline for the design system. We still deliver it in what we said, So 100% timeline, it will stay where it is until we feel that the experiment has been proven to work.
Yeah, and I mean, that would mean that it'll need more man hours, basically, there's more people on this to manually do the things that AI is doing right now.
Um, you Okay, so let me book in the meeting with the client. Let me... I've sent you that link. If everyone can fill in that link, let me finish the onboarding pack and the discovery and send it, you guys. Let's have the meeting with George and then... Is there any other business, any other questions or concerns from Discovery?
You're on the invite, Varun. You're invited. It's tomorrow at 10.30. I can resend it to you, but you are on the invite.
And I haven't booked in the client meeting yet. I'm doing that after now we've confirmed. Okay, okay.
The main thing for the meeting tomorrow with George and Vareen, if you can't attend, absolutely understand, but the main thing that we need to convey as a team, so this is why it's super important that everyone checks the links we're presenting and that you're filling in the Confluence page and everyone's reading it, we all need to be super aligned, that we're all on the same page on discovery and what the output is, that we're all on the same page of the AI experiment, and we're all on the same page on on the project onboarding so one thing i can't stress enough because sometimes these meetings with george will derail things in the meeting tomorrow if something comes alive where you're like oh no unless it's like super crucial and you think it would be detrimental for the project let's hang fire mentioning it in front of george so an example would be say if we're on the onboarding pack and we're like um actually no i'd raid separate as an example right just mention after the meeting to me not with George because George will it's got so information to upload he'll get confused um so that's the only thing I would request because we don't want to go in that meeting and George get confused because I just need an hour we just need an hour with him so then we can crack on with the project I really hope that makes sense and that's fairSo no side of the conversations except when it comes to talking to George.
Okay, cool. maybe during the meeting, like, let's just do a little Slack message with the five of us.
And if somebody says like, oh, I'd really like to mention this and, you know, we'll just put a little parking lot for anything that we, Basically you're saying it's more important to be aligned than to be perfect.
Yes, correct. Okay.
So Mikul have already shared the component list based on confluence that we received today, right? What that is missing is the live site Mapping. So if whenever you guys have the source code and you want to run it against that, then let me know.
The first one I looked at was called three column, but it could be three or two or one column based on a CMS toggle. I don't know if that's the right naming, but maybe that'll come out through our CMS sessions where it's like, "You content authors don't know how to use this stuff, so maybe we could change it." But for now, let's just use their terminology.
Yeah, because there were like four different sources, right?
References, there was LifeSite, then Confluence came in, then Figma, Design System File came in, and then there is an onboarding deck. So I'm treating Confluence as the source of truth for component names.
cool thank you Last week, so what we did, whatever discovery is now useless.
In our discovery, what we did like using Aircrawl and other MCP, That it has what like a way different. So let's. So now we have conference and it has a lot more detail and So we'll just use that only. I agree.
But Ryan's also mentioned in the mail that Figma, at least Figma is not a to the build, like they've not evolved it over the years.
And he said that onboarding that will have more indications as to what's really present on the live site. Um... Yeah, that's what he said on the email. So I'm also checking the onboarding deck for any indications. And that led to the confluence sheet. So, um... Yeah, it's like we need to sort of cross verify what are the discrepancies and if there's anything that's missing out or not added. or if something's obsolete.
Yeah, I need to curate a project. I'll do it by the end of the day. I'll get to it just give me the end of today if that's alright Yeah, basically, I wanted to push back on some of the meetings.
So I started pushing back already on different projects, which like I already have two projects in my bucket, I want to push things out from myself and want to focus on this, but I'm unable to do that right now. Because again, I don't have that assignment. Again, one more day doesn't make a huge difference. Whenever you get a chance, if you can do that, it will help me. Push back. Okay, that's, I will,