This sprint was something of a mess (seems like many of them are). I came back from GDC in California and began the process of catching up on the project and team. This has been difficult to do as the current sprint was somewhat a mess. My lead designer took it on her shoulders to set up the sprint, but unfortunately, with half the team gone at GDC at that time, the sprint wasn't very accurate to the needs of the project. I still am happy that there was something there, and I'm not sure I could've done any better. It's just a rough start to return to.
To add to this roughness, many of the members of the team who returned from GDC did not jump back into the project like they needed to. Tasks for many members were added a day or two before sprint close, and not accurate to the lead designers sprint plan from last week. This means that so much productivity for this week was lost or wasted, without much ability to counter this.
I attempted to wrangle this sprint together around the midpoint by messaging individual members and checking in on them based on their current task status. I caught up with people specifically who didn't have any tasks on the board yet and encouraged them to get some up ASAP.
This week for me primarily was meetings. I had a meeting with my lead designer early on in the week to try to grasp the sprint. I met with the lead team to try and get them on board with the current sprint. Then I met with some individual team members to try and streamline and fix some of the communication and review issues that seem to plague this project.
Class time will be the first test of these new processes that we came up with. One thing the team will be doing is everyone will play the latest build of the project and provide their input and feedback on it. Everyone will also be a part of the sprint review process and sprint planning process (with lead team guidance). We are also placing a programmer to be a personal assistant to designers to try and create a bit of separation between the programmer responsibilities, so that they don't step on each others toes as much (something that's been a bit problematic for them, and slows down the whole process). Hopefully these steps will help get the team more unified and on the same page for communication and review.
Looking forward, leads are going to be held more accountable to reviewing their discipline team's progress at the end of the sprint (and throughout the sprint). This means that they are going to be taking on less work personally, and divvying that work out to their team. For now, class is about to start so more to come later on whether these new processes work well for us or not.