Week 4 Project Management Assignment

Project Schedule Estimating Activity Duration

In week 4 I was a task with conducting a web search and locating at least two resources that would be useful in planning and ID project's schedule. I was then to explore the sites and consider how I might use them to help plan a project's schedule, budget, or break down a project's tasks. Finally, I am to write a brief description and evaluation of the resources available on each site. Share the most helpful thing I found about each site and how I might use it.

The first site I found was Chapman Alliance. Chapman Alliance can be found at http://www.chapmanalliance.com/howlong/. What I really like about this site is it gives the ID a baseline for the average of how long it takes to create learning. They broke creating learning down by industry. Then even broke it down further by what type of learning is being development. They base creating learning off the ADDIE model and provide the reader with percentages of times for each phase and what type of task will be performed to develop specific training like instructor-led and eLearning.  Chapman even included an average cost comparison summary in their PDF presentation. I strongly suggest if you are just getting into instructional design or you are working for a company that is just starting to build their training department that you take the time to review their presentation.

The second site I will share is Smartsheet. This is a collaboration application that allows you to plan your projects out at a detailed task level, assigns resources, assigns completion dates, check the task as completed, and allows the whole team to collaborate in real time. This site can be found at https://www.smartsheet.com/. I have been using this project-planning tool now for over two years and I find for what I need to track it is pretty sufficient. If you are working on a large-scale project like implementing SAP you may want to look at a more robust application.

References

Chapman Alliance. (2017). How long does it take to create learning? Retrieved from http://www.chapmanalliance.com/howlong/

Smartsheet. (2017). Retrieved from https://www.smartsheet.com/

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Project Management & Training Week 3

Communicating Effectively

Description of assignment this week

This week we reviewed the same message delivered using three different forms of communication modalities. The three forms were email, voice mail, and face-to-face.

The message consisted of Jane contacting Mark to get the data from a missing report that Mark had in his possession. Jane was asking Mark if he could giver her an ETA on receiving the report since the data in the report was needed for her to complete her task on time.

Interpretations of the message delivered in each modality

This week we learned when it comes to written communications it should begin with a clear purpose, state the situation, include possible solution, indicate if a sign-off is required, specify the form that the response is required to take, and keep tone business friendly and respectful (Laureate, 2016). After reviewing the three delivery methods of the message from Jane to Mark I felt that it did a pretty good job of included these requirements. The interpretation from one modality to another did seem different to me.

In the email version, I could not tell the tone or body language that would have been associated with the message. So I was unable to tell if Jane was upset with Mark taking his time getting her the missing report.

When I listen to the voice mail version I was able to tell that Jane was pleasantly requesting the missing report and didn’t seem like she was frustrated with the length of time Mark was taking to hand over the missing report.

Then I reviewed the face-to-face version of the message and I was left feeling that Jane is getting a little frustrated that she cannot seem to get a copy of the missing report from Mark by visually seeing her facial expressions.

Changes in interpretation from one modality to the next of the message

Dr. Stolovitch discussed that effective communications are influenced by spirit and attitude, tonality and body language, timing, and the personality of the recipient (Laureate, 2016). After reviewing all three communications modalities it is clear that it can be difficult to figure out the tonality and body language of the author of an email has compared to having the same communication with them face-to-face. At least with a voice mail, you can possibly figure out by the tone of the voice being used as to the possible feelings of the communicator toward a situation.

My thoughts regarding what this activity implied about communicating with members of a project team.

Depending on the modality used to deliver the message the message can be interpreted differently. Important communications should be done with all team members through a virtual or face-to-face meeting. Once this type of communication is completed it is important to document what decisions were made, how decisions will be implemented and by who.

How will this new knowledge help me communicate more effectively with others in the future?

As an instructional designer I must switch and put on my project manager hat I need to make sure that I communicate clearly, concisely, and with a focus to help my project team stay focused and on target. There will always be room in misinterpreting a communication so it is important that any decisions made should also be documented.

References

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Communicating with stakeholders [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

Project Management Week 2

Learning from a Project “Post-mortem”

This week’s blog focuses on the importance of the Post-mortem analysis of a project. Recently I was involved in not only being the instructional designer, developer, and facilitator but the project manager for a training project. Let me share a description of the project with you.

A brief description of the project.

I was asked to build a training project for our regional administrators on what their new roles and responsibilities would be in supporting store managers in the use of the new learning management system (LMS). The training would also require that the regional administrators perform tasks within the LMS. I was given five weeks to analyze, design, develop, and facilitate training for 26 regional administrators spread across the U.S. using a virtual classroom, course training materials, and an LMS sandbox that was forever changing since it was being configured as training was built. If you’re a practicing instructional designer I’m sure you’re chuckling right about now and feeling my pain.

What contributed to the project’s success or failure?

Dr. Van Rekom stated this week that one of the challenges of a project is setting the scope of a project right at the beginning (Laureate, 2016). Without documenting what is in scope for a project or out of scope can cause scope creep. Scope creep can increase the time, budget, and scope to any project.

In the case of the administrator training project, I had documented that the scope would include training 26 regional administrators over 4 sessions that would be 2 hours in length. The success of the project would be measured through level 1, 2, and 3 evaluations. By the time it came to deliver the first session management had the training audience up to 76 participants. Many of these participants would never have access to perform the task within the new LMS and did not have access to the sandbox. This kept them from participating in any of the sandbox activities, which in turn caused confusion the first day and I was unable to get through all the training task for that particular session. From the level 1 evaluation, I was able to show management that by adding the additional participants the regional admins that were supposed to learn their new responsibility tasks within the LMS felt the class was too large for adequate learning to take place.

Also within scope was to train the regional admins on how to run out of the box reports from the LMS. To accomplish this training task the reporting function would need to be working properly 1 week before training started. As the project moved forward it was quite obvious that the reporting function was not going to be working properly before training began. This issue was brought to the stakeholder’s attention and it was decided that training for reporting would take place anyway. Once again from the level 1 evaluation we found that the regional admins found this part of the training as a challenge since they were unable to see what the reports would look like once ran.

Being able to measure for success and documenting the results really helped to share with the stakeholders the importance of not creating scope creep within our projects.

I also learned that no matter how well you state what is in scope you can only support it so far management will always have the final say. This is a heads up to any of you thinking about becoming an ID or PM.

Which parts of the PM process would have made the project more successful? Why?

During the beginning of any project, you are identifying your project team and assembling them before the kick-off meeting. This allows the project manager to document in the project plan each team member's role and responsibility. Part of the process during a kick-off meeting, as a project manager, is to obtain specific commitments from each team member. In the case of the regional admin training, I believe that not only did I document management's role and responsibility, I thought I had also obtained their commitment to support what was in and out of scope for the project. Apparently, this was not the case.

Conclusion

When performing your post-mortem review take the time to analyze each phase in your project plan. If there are many project team members send out a list of questions prior to the meeting to give those analytical thinkers time to form a response (Greer, 2010). This will allow them a chance to come to the meeting prepared to share what they thought worked well and what didn't during the project. Once you have all responses documented you will be able to see if the challenges during the project were because of team dynamics and/or technical process challenges. If there are more than three improvements that need to be made. I focus on the top three for the next project.

Reference

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Practioner voices: Overcoming ‘scope creep’ [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

Greer, M., (2010). The Project Management Minimalist: Just Enough PM to Rock Your Projects! Laureate Education. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu/bbcswebdav/institution/USW1/201740_02/MS_INDT/EDUC_6145/artifacts/pm-minimalist-ver-3-laureate.pdf

Project Management Course

Project Management

For those of you that have been following my blog, you know that I am currently working on my Master's degree. For those of you that are new to my blog Welcome! 


The next eight weeks of my degree program has me focusing on project management and the role this will play for instructional designers now and in the future. 

Many of us instructional designers know that we wear many hats throughout the process of analyzing, designing, developing, implementing, and evaluating training. So it should not come as any surprise how important it is that we also are able to put on a project manager hat when we are called upon to do so.  

Being able to possess the skills and competencies required to be a project manager is only going to help our training projects to be implemented on time and under budget. 
 
I look forward to sharing what I learn on this topic so please check back during the next eight weeks to learn more. You can also subscribe to my blog in the top right-hand corner.