LBi CPD

It's all in the blend

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:02:00 +0000

2010 saw a range of changes across the business for us at LBi that we needed to respond to in a growing and speedy fashion. L&D as a result cannot and does not sit with one person. Teams are encouraged to carry out their own L&D activities that they see are relevant and meaningful for them. As such we’ve seen a range of things happening of which I’m positively beaming about.

Creative

These guys hold a weekly Friday Fun meeting. They come together, get given a brief and have 20-30 minutes to crack the problem. It’s not business critical, the outcome doesn’t matter, and there’s no pressure on what they produce. So what happens? They unleash their joint creative force and come up with brilliant concepts that’s what. And, importantly, they’re able to take those fresh eyes and apply different thinking to their daily work and produce inspired creative work.

User Experience Architect

Two forms of meetings are held with this sharp thinking team. Mini-mamas and Big-mamas! I could just leave it at those names, because quite frankly they are brilliant. But, let’s not. The purpose of these meetings is to present some inspired findings and insights team members have come across that they want to share with their peers. This isn’t about showing off. This is about finding those things which go beyond best in class. They enter a realm of Jedi like meditation. And what do these guys do with it? Design some of the best insightful user experience formats you’ve ever come across.

Delivery Management

How many project managers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? This lot don’t care about the lightbulb. They care about the team they work with to come up with the plan. They’re not masters of their game for nothing. They have rare insight into each and every discipline across the business. And they have that because they actively seek out information from the business. And what they deliver is often beyond expectations of the client, and certainly beyond expectations of the groups they work with.

Technology

How do you keep a traditionally detail focused group engaged in creative activities? Simples. Include them in all of the above. We don’t let our teams sit by themselves. They blend together by being at each other’s meetings. They then come together, take that information and decide – as a Tech group what can we produce? I mean come on, have you seen Christmas Collaboration, Infi-Knit and David’s BeeBeard? They are the folk who made all those happen and more.

I’ve selected 4 departments from the power house that is LBi. If that’s what these 4 can do, can you imagine what the rest of the departments are doing too?

Richard Stevens, Programme Director at LBi Ltd, talks about...

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Richard Stevens, Programme Director at LBi Ltd, talks about sunset reviews and why we do them. Take it away Richard!

Project Management at LBi

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 11:56:54 +0000

This is a guest post from Nick Langton, Head of Delivery Management at LBi Ltd.

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We structure the team into bi-weekly project meetings. These meetings are broken into new business lines or services that have come into LBi. It’s a chance to feedback and review from sunset reviews, and to disseminate knowledge throughout the department of potential issues or working pratcies that benfitted the project.

We also have a number of brown bag lunches every 2 weeks that allow for detailed descriptions of services and key contacts in the agency to the delivery management team. Other fundamentals such as project planning, risk management, and use of Tempos are also delivered in these sessions.

Underpinning all of this we use the LBi performance review structure to identify 4-5 key company objectives that are distributed to the project team and identify 3-4 personal learning objectives such as development of skills in specific areas such as CMS implementation, mobile app development or financial services.

We train our Leader level project managers (and above) to Prince2 Practitioner qualifications and we have a core team of Agile project manager who are trained in Scrum Master methodology. Currently about 60% of the team have Prince2, and we’re looking to raise this 75% over the next 2 years.

Effectively all this activity means that our team are best placed to work with the range of services we have on offer, understand how they work, what deliverables they produce, and how they meet our clients’ needs and business goals.

Our Business Development Director, Rosalie Kurton, talks about...

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:27:59 +0000

Our Business Development Director, Rosalie Kurton, talks about how we continually improve the way we approach new business at LBi.

Stand up? In a room? Sit down? Let’s just get the sh*t...

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:25:09 +0000

Stand up? In a room? Sit down? Let’s just get the sh*t done.

"Hearing from the industries best. Meeting like-minded people. Getting pitch experience without the..."

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:22:00 +0000

“Hearing from the industries best. Meeting like-minded people. Getting pitch experience without the pressure. What’s not to like about NABS Fast Forward?

One of the best experiences was collaborating with a new set of people to experience what the rest of the industry is like, who for someone who has only worked in one agency was invaluable. I got real insight to other people’s job roles too which I feel gives me better understanding of how we can all work together and I’ve taken this into my everyday agency life. But the thing I found most inspiring was listening to some of the industries stars.”

- Hannah Drury, Copywriter, LBi Ltd

Our awesome Experience Architect team at a UPA event. Go Stuey...

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:18:25 +0000

Our awesome Experience Architect team at a UPA event. Go Stuey and Mehul!

A testimonial about internal training

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:08:33 +0000

This is a guest post from Paul Worrall, Project Manager at LBi Ltd.

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I attended the facilitation training session about 6 months ago. This has helped greatly across all team meetings, especially when gathering info from a broad project team.

A specific instance relates to agile project methodology. When planning a sprint (iteration of work) we took a day to plan this. The morning session was to review the product backlog and select user stories for the upcoming sprint. The afternoon was used to place hour time estimates for each discipline (qa, int dev, java dev, design etc) for each user story. That information was used to check we had correct resource levels, had not over promised and was used for the sprint burndown chart which tracked progress. Both sessions were attended by all team members and various client stakeholders.

The afternoon session had traditionally been trawling selected user stories and allocating hour estimates individually. This involved a very dry session with one user operating computer to insert agreed hours. This would take 4 hours on average.

After facilitation training I altered the session. I split the team in to smaller teams, gave them post it notes and asked them all to write up the individual hours for each discipline. They then reported those back to the other teams to validate as some teams did not have all disciplines included. The wider team were able to suggest if estimates were too high or low or correct.

After a couple of sessions we got the afternoon session down to 1-1.5 hours. With a big team this saves a lot of time and, of course, money. The additional bonus is that the team talked to one another, not just mates they knew before, so this helped team morale and helped efficiency in communication.

How CPD really helps our Creative product

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:00:00 +0000

This is a guest post from Dr Simon Gill, Executive Creative Director at LBi Ltd.

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We couldn’t continue to develop great creative without investing in our staff and continuous personal development. Fact.

The World doesn’t stand still so we collectively need to improve and continually reset the level at which we feel creative excellence can be achieved. And we can only do that by operating as a connected group that looks to develop its strengths and address its weaknesses.

So how do we do this?

First of all we do this by building a strong team dynamic. The Internet Age is not about the lone star, it’s about the blended team bringing their individual skills together to achieve the impossible.

We help facilitate this by having a regular team meeting in where all members are encouraged to share their ideas, experience and current work. We call this Friday Fun where everyone is encouraged to provide thought provoking ideas to produce innovative solutions to possible clients problems, in rapid time. By using various techniques we help stretch team members and jolt them from thinking in certain ways. The ideas are used across our clients and our recent campaign for Macmillian Cancer Support, the Infi-Knit is a result of one session.

In addition we run bi-weekly sessions were team members share their work with their peers, justifying what they’ve done and learning from the feedback of others. It works to continually challenge what people are doing and how they can improve that.

We also run a series of training courses that address core craft skills; such as Art Direction, articulating ideas, presenting the idea and brainstorming techniques. These courses help raise the experience of the wider team and provide greater incentive to be more creative on regular work.

Attendance of these training sessions is identified by bi-yearly reviews, which assess performance against a consistent attainment plan for all in creative. This joined up approach helps raise quality across all levels and ensure we have a team that knows what is expected and how we roll.

Anna and Simon joined our Client Services team on the graduate...

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 08:19:55 +0000

Anna and Simon joined our Client Services team on the graduate programme at LBi Ltd. Here they tell us what they think so far.

Christmas Collaboration

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:57:19 +0000

Christmas Collaboration

Post it notes? Check. Flipchart? Check. Circle of virtue? Check.

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:55:42 +0000

Post it notes? Check. Flipchart? Check. Circle of virtue? Check.

Our Group MDs coming together to have a li’l chinwag.

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:50:45 +0000

Our Group MDs coming together to have a li’l chinwag.

We've never used any of this stuff before. We'd like you to build something with it

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:47:00 +0000

This is a guest post from Paul Carvill, Head of Interface Development at LBi.

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LBi actively encourages blending between the disciplines found in a digital agency — it’s what sets us apart. Developers, creatives, client services and user experience architects work together in truly meaningful ways, and, over the last year in particular, have had a valuable dialogue and, going further, have started to really understand the challenges of each other’s roles. Digital is a fast moving business, and keep up with the daily march of progress requires a strong culture of learning, acceptance and compromise. Working closely together in the way we do increases communication, eases the burden of knowledge transfer and reduces the likelihood of one team producing a square peg when the other team has a round socket.

Here are two examples of how LBi provides an environment which supports and indeed necessitates self-driven learning.

LBi Pulse is an in-house application we give to every LBi employee, which gives them the opportunity to make a continuous statement about how they are feeling on a number of work-related issues. It runs on every computer, sitting in the background ready for you to update whenever you like. It uses a technology stack which we had never worked with before, but given a tight deadline the developers were encouraged to dive in and produce whatever they could. We chart the aggregated results of everyone’s voting patterns, but it also exposes an API which allows anybody in LBi to create their own visualisation of the data. As you would imagine, this implicit widening of the team gives us a much greater change of creating something which people are happy with and more likely to interact with.

The Kiosk project was a week-long sprint to build a working prototype of a touch-screen kiosk to sit in a retail environment. None of us had ever worked on a kiosk before, and it has considerable limitations. Luckily, this meant we were all in the same boat, so we could disregard preconceptions out the door and get down to learning how to build this thing. Creatives and techies set up camp in the LBi basement and threw the usual rulebook out the window. Working fast with a hastily assembled touchscreen, we worked together to discover everything that is bad about touchscreen interfaces — small controls, screen clutter, slow response times, superfluous information, ambiguous touch states — and made a beautiful, big-buttoned, attractive interface that was a joy to use. The client loved it, the team had been on a journey together and we’d built something entirely new.

Both of these projects are great examples of how LBi creates a fun, interesting environment which, by stretching every employee, aims to strengthen the team, retain staff and, most importantly, make great work.

"We had some training with an external company focusing on Up Sell and Cross Sell for the Account..."

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:13:52 +0000

“We had some training with an external company focusing on Up Sell and Cross Sell for the Account Managers and above in the media team. There were two sessions where we focused on some of the theory behind selling but crucially spent most of the time role playing these techniques in real situations. I found the sessions extremely useful, not only for learning some of the techniques for selling but also for having the time to really think about what opportunities there are within our client base and to share these with the broader team. Off the back of these sessions we have set up a number of meetings with prospective clients and closed some key opportunities, I think the training definitely gave us the push and confidence we needed. A smaller group of Account Directors also had a third session which focussed on coaching and how we could ensure the principles we covered in the sessions were kept alive in our teams. This has been crucial to ensuring the training did not live in isolation but has become embedded in the way we work”

- Rebecca Braithwaite, Media Account Director, LBi Ltd

EA team being busy card-sorting.

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:11:00 +0000

EA team being busy card-sorting.

Facebook Garage event in April 2010

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:02:00 +0000

Facebook Garage event in April 2010

CPD? Erm, you mean business as usual right?

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:00:00 +0000

We don’t make the explicit effort of calling things we do ‘CPD’. They’re just daily activities that we have to do in order to stay on top of our game. As mentioned in other posts, we’re all about blending our disciplines and collaboration. That means everyone has to buy into that ethos. And what better leadership than our C suite delivering courses?

They’re carefully chosen to deliver the courses that closely fit with their skills. Our CEO delivers Leadership and Management training. Our FD delivers Assertiveness training. Our COO delivers Negotiation Skills. The knowledge and breadth of learning this group pass on is invaluable. They do this though, because they know that in an agency such as ours, people need direction. They need to know what’s expected of them. And those messages come direct from this level of management.

That ultimately means we have clear direction about where we’re heading as a business. We haven’t reached the cleaner at Nasa scenario yet, but we’re not far off. This group help all levels across the business learn the skills they need to be successful. And they get challenged on a lot of business practices at the same time. Which is good. It means we don’t get complacent. It also means the theory of an open door policy isn’t just a theory. Our C suite live and breathe that theory every day.

Company Values

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:53:49 +0000

Every business that is serious and wants to grow needs a culture that can be defined and captured. Be it through company values, strategy, vision, or whatever you choose to call it, you’ll have something that defines who you are. For us at LBi, it’s our values: Provocative, Expert and Collaborative.

Provocative

We work incredibly hard at producing amazing work for our clients. That doesn’t come through aiming for best practice standards. It comes through understanding how to get the best from everyone you work with. It manes challenging the status quo and not accepting best in class. So we take great care in pushing ourselves to produce business insights, and when we do, not only are we pleased with the work, our clients are too.

Expert

There are upwards of 15 distinct disciplines who are involved in a project lifecycle at some point or another. Each of those disciplines has a deep understanding of what they are capable of, what the client is asking for and how they can best achieve it. They are all highly skilled at what they do and are constantly searching for opportunities for continual development. Importantly, though, you realise that they display the qualities of being an expert in their fields and that pays dividends to the work we do.

Collaborative

We would not be able to achieve the great work we do, with the strength of personalities we have, if we didn’t work together to achieve business success. We may disagree on many things as different groups, but the one thing we agree on – every time – is we can only help our clients achieve their desired results if we blend our thinking and approach so that we can achieve this.

The challenge for us in 2010 was how do we embed our Values into the very being of the agency. We made some important strides in that respect by creating definitions around each of the Values and what they mean for respective disciplines. That was the easy bit(!) What awaits us in 2011 is a roll out of the Values into a competency framework which crosses appraisals, reviews, recruitment and career planning. Wow.

It's us!

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 16:51:00 +0000

Crikey. What’s all this about then? We’re members of the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising), and as part of our submission for CPD (continuous professional development) we’re going for Gold Accreditation, which basically means we want to have a badge that says we’re that damn good. The good folks over there are open to how they receive the submission, and this means at the same time we can show the big bad world, just how good it is to work here. So enjoy :)