Summer camp: setting the stage

This is a second post of a “Summer camp” series. In the first post I’ve wrote about initial idea and the main reasoning. Here is a detailed preparation overview.

Poll and approvals

So what did I start from? First I’ve mentioned this idea to my pairs and one representative of top management “Wouldn’t it be cool to organize such an offsite for our teams?”. To my surprise everyone liked and supported this idea.

My next step after getting this “informal approval” was to create a short poll (I just love short polls, it’s easy, you get fast feedback, you have all responses in one place). Here are the questions, I asked:

Do you like the idea of “Summer camp”? (Yes , No)
Will you participate? (Yes , No)
What place would you like to work from? (Spain Mallorca , Spain Tenerife , Lithuania Nida , Greece Kos , Greece Rhodes , Suggest your place)
How many people would travel with you: spouse, children, friends? (You will need to pay 100% of expenses for each additional person)
How long would you like to stay in summer camp? (3 days , 7 days , 14 days , Specify your own value)
When would you like to go to summer camp? (August , September , October , Specify your own value)
How many of your personal money would you be able to pay for your stay and flight tickets? (0 , Up to 500 LTL , Up to 1000 LTL , Up to 1500 LTL , Specify your own value)

After analyzing responses it became clear: we are going to Mallorca for 10 days. I made a skin-deep research of villas and flight tickets to calculate our expenses.

We decided to split all costs this way: company pays for villa’s rental and flight tickets and we personally pay for transfer, car rental, gas expenses, food, drinks and basically everything else :).

With cost list I addressed our top management and easily got approval! I even got suggestions and more ideas how to organize it and what risks we might have.

Booking

After all approvals were received, I once again asked who would attend. Together with the team we’ve started searching for appropriate villa with WiFi and rooms for each of us, somewhere not very far from the see, with spacious area to work in. We selected one on www.airbnb.com, I contacted the owner to discuss details. We booked it.

It was much faster and easier with the flight tickets - we just found them and booked.

In progress

Now we are working with product owner on defining our mission - what will we create offsite? And the last thing left to do before packing - create a sightseeing plan :)

11 days left! I plan to write next blog post in this series from Mallorca, so stay tuned :)