Hi. My name is Jason Mock, Assistant Director at the University of Illinois, Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. After graduating from Illinois with my Masters in Education, I've worked in online education for 15 years in corporate, government and higher education spaces, including seven years as an instructional designer before moving into instructional design management in 2015. I'd love to share with you my experience in managing instructional design projects. I think of project management as one of the three key legs of an instructional designers tool, together with pedagogy and technology. Specifically, I'd like to break project management down into a couple of different levels, each of which I'll share with you. At the macro of a project level and at the micro or managing individual activities level. It's important for you to develop a system and a set of tools that works for you but also look for insights from others. I'll share some of mine here with you to help you get started. Any journey involves various steps to get through it, and it's your job as an instructional designer to guide and shepherd the project through to completion. Good project management helps you do just that. Let's start at the macro of a project level. It's important to identify, if you haven't already, the phases of development, the milestones you need to hit along the way and a planned duration for each phase. Here we see a diagram of the major phases used at Illinois in developing an online course, including this one. Now, the actual milestones I'm showing here may be interesting but are not what's important to the current conversation. Again, you will want to map out steps in the process for your institution and those may change over time and in different places. We also see here the other portion of the diagram depicts approximately how long each phase takes. Again, your situation may be different, but it's important to figure out what those milestones typically are as we'll use them in the next step. Let's listen in on a simplified reenactment of how the conversation may have gone between Grasol, one of the professors teaching this very course, and Tanya Hip, the instructional designer actually working on this course. I'll show you the visualized milestone schedule Tanya is modifying through the conversation. Be sure to listen to Tanya as she explains why she is modifying the schedule with each of Professor O responses. Okay, Professor O. Let's talk today about the milestone schedules. So, I created a milestone table for you. Today in our meeting, I would like to talk about when we need to accomplish certain key milestones in the project in order to be able to launch your course. Sure, it sounds good. Okay. So, first, can you tell me when you would like your course to launch. The course is part of a program and the college would like the program to launch on October first. So, we need to launch this course on October first as well. I see. So, our process typically involves working pretty consistently with you over the next six months. Usually our course development process lasts for six months. As I work backwards with our milestones, I'm noticing that today is April first, the course launches on October first, and because we usually work over the course of six months, I think we should get started right away. That should be fine, I can do that. Okay, great. My other question for you is, do you anticipate between today and October first to be out of the office on conferences, vacation, and when roughly so I can adjust the milestone schedule accordingly? Yeah, actually, I'll be out of town for the first two weeks in July. Okay. So, you'll be out of town for two weeks, the first two weeks in July, which means that we probably need to adjust our buffer time from two weeks to zero. So, let me just work backwards to adjust our schedule based on your availability. Okay. So, we usually leave about two weeks of buffering our schedule to take into account any delays in the project or anything that might take longer than usual. This means that given our revised schedule, you and I both need to commit to not missing any of the deadlines and abide by the milestone schedule. Is that okay with you? Yeah, I can do that. I hope that gives you an idea of what such a conversation might be like. In this vignette, Tanya didn't know that Professor O would be away on vacation. So, she needed to adjust her plan accordingly. Your project will likely have other complicating factors. In this very course, for example, Tanya needed to not only coordinate around Professor O's schedule, but also around Professor Huang's. The schedule was complicated by the fact that the instructors wanted to incorporate guest lectures such as myself. Tanya is also working on this project as a member of a team of copy editors, video producers, and more. As was mentioned, Tanya also needed to be aware of the schedule for the next course in the program being developed to ensure there was no conflict. As an instructional designer, her role as a project manager means she needs to understand the process, predict where there may be constraints on timelines, and coordinate closely with everyone involved to not only come up with a viable plan, but check in on their progress on a regular basis. Take a moment and consider the last time you built a schedule for a project. Perhaps it was for an online course development project, or even planning a wedding or a birthday party, or arranging a study schedule to prepare for final exams. Ask yourself, did everything go according to your plan? Did you allow enough time for each step? What would you do differently? Take a moment to consider that. Now that we've talked about managing the project as a whole, let's look at the more micro level of keeping track of tasks and individual deliverables. There are a number of ways to help with that. A cloud-based file sharing system such as Box, Google Drive or Dropbox to name a few, enables everyone on the team, including your subject matter expert to have access to the latest version of every file. No more tracking down attachments in emails to forward to the person who needs them and hope they have the latest version. Keep the shared folders clean and organized so that people know where to look for the files they need. If one person is responsible for one part of a process before handing it over to another person, for example, an artist creates a diagram, a copy editor gives her approval to use an image, an editor exports a video, then it quickly becomes difficult to keep track of who is working on what. It helps tremendously to develop some sort of system, perhaps even a basic spreadsheet, to help you and your team keep track of the status of each asset. Meetings are often seen as waste of time but they don't have to be. Give each meeting a purpose by planning ahead what you need to accomplish in the meeting. Invite just the people you need to accomplish that goal. Make sure everyone is clear when leaving the meeting who is responsible for each action item coming out of that meeting and take notes. You may think that you will remember all of the key decisions that were made during a meeting, but as you take on multiple projects and more time passes after a decision was made, it will become hard to remember everything. Having a record will help you stay organized. So, what is your next step? Of the various tools and strategies I just shared, which one of them will you commit to looking into further and trying out tomorrow or on your next project? Think about that for a moment. I hope this has helped you think about and appreciate the value of project management for an instructional designer, both at the high level and in managing the details. I find that good project management has been essential in my career, especially as I moved from working on individual courses to designing programs of courses, to now managing a team of 15 instructional design staff who collectively work on over 100 course projects per year. Good project management allows our team and the subject matter experts with whom we work to spend more time thinking about and working on the pedagogical and technical aspects of creating a high quality online course. My best hopes to you for successful careers instructional designer, this field needs people like you. Thank you.
