Right now, when I start to write this blog post, I’m on my way back from the best journey I have ever done! We have been four families, with an age span from 4 to 54, travelling to various locations in the United States (like Hawaii, San Francisco & Los Angeles). We all come from Sweden so it’s a long journey, both in distance and time for us. In this blog post, I will tell about which tools and Agile practices we used to make this journey successful!
Picture 1 – Sunset seen from Santa Monica Pier
Pre-planning
Google Hangouts
Since the four families lives in different places in Sweden, we needed a tool for our planning meetings. We choose Google Hangouts, mainly because some of us use it at work. The planning meetings had no real structure, but screens we shared to for example show interesting hotels that we could book in the different locations we were visiting. The messaging function of Google Hangouts was also used heavily, to send information and URL:s back and forth. This planning meetings started out already in March (nine months prior our departure).
Picture 2 – Conversion on Google Hangouts planning the trip
Airtable
After a while, we had agreed on a travel plan and we started to do bookings of flights and hotels. We took help from a Traveling Agency for some of the bookings (they were for example able to book cheaper flights). With a lot of information gathered that we needed to keep track of, we selected Airtable as the tool. It is an online tool, and it is easy to invite members to use it. It can be seen as a cross-over between a spreadsheet and a Kanban-board. We used Airtable to store information about our booked flights and hotels as well as suggestions of tourist attractions we wanted to visit.
Picture 3 – Collection of tourist attractions we wanted to see, gathered in Airtable
The actual journey
The framework for the journey was set with all the bookings we had made. We knew how many days we had planned to stay at each location.
Planning meeting for activities
When we arrived at a new location I hosted a planning meeting to have everyone to agree on what activities we should do the upcoming days. Given the span in age and different interest in the activities, we of course sometimes splited the group of four families into other constellations. Overall, we kept a general plan for each location that everybody agreed upon.
Board for activities
To capture and visualise the planning I put up a simple board with post-its on whatever I found suitable (pro-tip: bring your own tape to make the post-its stick better 🙂 ). One column for each day at the location, and three rows dividing a day into three sections: Before lunch, afternoon and evening. This showed to be pretty sufficient for our needs.
Picture 4 – A planning board on a glass table
Google Maps
All four families rented their own car for travelling in California, US. The traffic in Los Angeles can be pretty hectic, so it was nearly impossible for us to drive together as a group. To solve this problem we planned routes using Google Maps. We did that at the hotel, while having access to wi-fi. The good thing with Google Maps are that routes can be downloaded (the person who planned the route shared the link using Google Hangouts, and all the other ”navigators” in the separate cars downloaded it to their phones, while having wi-fi access). This way we saved money, not to use roaming to get mobile data. The one thing you miss navigating after an offline route, is traffic updates. Normally this is no problem. But it becomes obvious during rush hours, then Google Maps can offer alternative routes depending on the traffic situation. Sometimes we turned on mobile data when driving in rush hour, to get these traffic updates.
Overall, we had a very positive experience using Google Maps on the phone for navigating, compared to an ordinary GPS. Actually, the car rental firm wanted 197$ for GPS in the car. Way to expensive!
Picture 5 – Navigating using Google Maps, shown in offline and night time mode
Summary
The stuff described above helped us to have the structure needed to be able to perform a trip of this kind, without any major disappointments. Travelling a large group together can be quite challenging, and I wouldn’t recommend doing it without any pre-planning/structure (carpe diem may work if you are a smaller group).
All the best,
Tomas from TheAgileist
The Agileist 