Management tactics, skills, procedures, and tools for planning and administering educational projects. Includes planning, implementing, maintaining, and closing projects; investigating project management issues on scope, changes, and quality.
Full disclosure: Prior to entering this class, I knew just enough about project management to be dangerous. 🙂 In my first consulting job, it was expected that all instructional designers would eventually become instructional project managers, and pursue the career path in that company which led to that goal. At the time, I pushed back strongly against this career progression for a number of reasons, most important of which at the time was I did not get into this field to be a manager. I enjoy helping others learn. I do not enjoy balancing budgets or informing a coworker they are underperforming; those were what I saw at the time as the main duties of a project manager (PM).
Over the years, I’ve come to learn that managing a project involves much more than managing people and money, though those things are definitely key. Each consulting gig I held gave me incrementally more exposure to the tools used to manage project progress, such as Gantt charts and PERT charts; emotional intelligence as applied to interactions with team members and clients; and applying time metrics to development and implementation of deliverables.
Most of these topics, plus a lot more, are covered in IDE 767. The course material gave me a way to formally structure the phases of managing a project:
- Define
- Plan
- Organize
- Control
- Close
This resembles the classic waterfall method of project management, in which one phase must be complete or nearly so before progressing to the next phase. Most, but not all, of my consulting assignments have followed this paradigm.
Work Samples
We were given a choice of one of four project scenarios to work on. The scenario I had the most experience with was the business development scenario, but as a self-described sports junkie I raised my virtual hand for the project addressing an instructional solution for student athletes who were missing classes and practices due to poor time management skills. It helped that we pursued this project in the midst of March Madness—a great way to get into the mindset of putting ourselves in the athletes’ shoes!
During the project development period, we were thrown a couple of curveballs: changes to the project that required the adjustment of time, resources, or both. I appreciated these roadblocks, since from experience I know that that is exactly what happens on real projects. Stuff happens. Funding gets pulled or decreased. People join and leave the project. The client wants additional deliverables—the dreaded scope creep. And just as in real life, we were given a finite amount of time to make the adjustments to the project plan. I think our team reacted to these changes well and were still able to deliver a quality product.
My team colleagues, Mike Klemperer, and Jay Lang, are both teachers in a local school district known for their high educational standards. Mike and Jay both teach STEM subjects, so among the three of us, I was happy to leave the left-brain, quantitative tasks to them, while I was able to contribute on the right-brain side, adding visual flair (I hope) to our presentation and the project report. I’m delighted to bring you our final presentation video below. Mike is narrating. They were both great colleagues to work with.
In addition to the video and the final report (not shown here), I present a sample deliverable prepared for the eventual customer—the successful student athlete.
Final Grade: A
Beth's Journey Through the Instructional Design Universe 