What were your objectives?

Construct the arenas and all of the props for them.

Do you feel that these objectives were successfully met?

Yes, everything pretty much went to plan. Token construction happend and produced tokens of acceptable quality. Arena construction happened and, excluding the marking out and carpet laying, took roughly as long as I expected.

What problems did you encounter in achieving these objectives?

I originally planned to provide more oversight to the token construction process, but for various reasons didn't manage to do this. However, this turned out to be a non-issue as everyone maintained the level of quality required. During token construction it was disovered that two of the libkoki markers are not recognised by libkoki, at least with the webcam that was used (Logitech C270).

The arena carpet delivery being only a few hours before it was required was not ideal. Obviously this was outside of our control.

The arena construction took a little longer than anticipated. I think that this was due to it being the first year in which I've managed the carpet laying, so didn't have a good feel for exactly what was required and how long it would take. I also think that my somewhat unnecessary attention to detail slowed the carpet laying process down.

There was also a surprising amount of polishing to be applied to the arenas that I hadn't fully taken into account in my planning.

A final arena related problem I encountered was that I had not planned the arena change-over process at all before the Sunday. Also there was only 7 minutes in the schedule for this process.

Did you solve those problems, and if so, how?

I didn't really have to do anything to manage the token construction after it began, but I feel that this was more through luck than careful planning. Eventually we completely removed tokens of type 'net A' (the ones with the defective markers) from arena A.

The arena construction just took as long as it took, so there wasn't really anything done explicitly to solve it taking longer than expected.

With respect to the arena change-over I managed to forumlate a plan and gather a group of people to assist me on Sunday. This was by far from ideal but just about worked and we managed to perform the change-over with about 5 seconds to spare.

What changes would you put in place in future to avoid those problems?

In the future I would like to delegate the task of managing arena prop construction at an early in the competition preparation process.

I would like to get the carpet delivered to the venue a few days before the setup day. Since it looks like a delivery attempt might have been made on the Wednesday but failed, this shows that it's not as simple as solely relying on the venue for this.

I feel like I now have a better idea as to how the carpet laying is performed and will be able to plan better for it in the future. I can also incorporate the polishing steps in the Arena Manage documentation.

I will draw up a plan for arena change-over and brief a team, ideally on Friday while it's still quiet.

Did you find that the information you needed to fulfil your objectives was readily available to you? If not, please go into specifics.

Yes, mainly because I've done it all before ;)

Were there any new initiatives that you tried that you felt were particularly successful?

The token construction was pipelined and this worked very well. The tokens for SR2016 were particularly fiddly and prone to construction mistakes. Pipelining allowed each person to focus on their task and resulted in all tokens being constructed correctly.

I used plastic jerry cans for ballast on the arena wall feet. This worked extremely well.

What objectives are you setting yourself for next time?

• Delegate arena prop construction.
• Speed up arena construction.
• Achieve a more slick arena change-over.