Project Management for Instructional Designers (Part one of a four-part series)

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This is part one of a four-part series on Project Management for Instructional Designers for the EDU 627 course.

EDU 627 – Managing Instruction & Technology marks my second course at Post University on my journey towards my M.E.d. The scope of this class focuses on the role of project management for instructional designers.  In truth, this course could not have come at a better time for me. I currently work at a University myself, where I do data analytics, assessment, and instructional design. My university is in the process of migrating to a new learning management system (LMS) as we leave the Blackboard LMS for Canvas LMS. 

While I will be helping move the process along in various ways cross-collaboratively, I am personally responsible for our institution’s academic/accreditation assessment software. We will be changing our assessment software from the dated and archaic assessment platform – Taskstream – to a product called Portfolium, which is offered with Canvas. I will be directly responsible for all facets of the assessment software migration – from implementation to training – and everything in between.

When I say this course could not have come at a better time, I absolutely mean it – all of these systems need to be migrated over the next five months; so I will be using what I learn in this class and applying it to my role at my university in tandem.

There are so many moving parts to this migration project, my part is just one of many. Looking at the scope, it is very intimidating. Much of what I studied this week does help organize the scope, logistically – or more accurately, the project profile. A project profile is a serious of characteristics such as budget and size that are used to determine a systematic approach to developing an execution plan for a project (Wiley et al., 2011). 

I find that my anxious thoughts regarding the migration are not unfounded, as most projects are usually non-linear (Wiley et al., 2011). With so many moving parts and so many processes occurring at once, trying to plan for a perfect outcome and process from a-z without any need to update and adapt is simply not feasible. The more the project plays out, the more the environment changes with the passage of time. Planning with change in mind allows for the project to be more agile. That in mind, it is critical to create an execution plan that is strategically agile that can be implemented successfully, as most projects are likely to fail at the beginning of the project, not the end (Wiley et al., 2011).

During my first master’s in organizational leadership (MSOL), I took a course called OL 665 – Leading Organizational Change. Much of that course was about strategy and agility, and I still have a video bookmarked from that course by Martin Reeves which can be viewed below. Martin shows us the importance of being agile when planning a strategy, and as most projects are likely to fail in the beginning because of so many moving parts, being strategically agile or planning with “stragility” (strategically agile) is critical. 

Be sure to check back for part two, due out in approximately two weeks from the date of this entry.

References:

Amado, M., Ashton, K., Ashton, S., Bostwick, J., Clements, G., Drysdale, J., Francis, J., Harrison, B., Nan, V., Nisse, A., Randall, D., Rino, J., Robinson, J., Snyder, A., Wiley, D., & Anonymous. (2011). Project Management for Instructional Designers. Retrieved from http://pm4id.org/.

Auster, E. R., & Hillenbrand, L. (2016). Stragility : Excelling at Strategic Changes. Rotman-UTP Publishing.