Speaker 1: Hey, everyone. My name is Katie, and I will be joining you today. Today's session, we're going to really talk about collaborating on ID projects. Really, the purpose of building good communication is that it involves effectively sharing information, brainstorming ideas, helping to move past barriers or solving problems, and also just in general, being able to make good decisions together as a team. It really is essential to make sure that your team is functioning well, that your project needs are served well, and that you're able to have a completed solution that really helps your learning audience, the organization, or whatever that may be. It really involves strong communication, building a communication plan, conducting team meetings effectively, and regularly having regular discussions between all the different stakeholders and people that are involved in that project, which could be clients if you're a freelancer. It also could be lots of other people within an organization. Collaborating effectively is going to involve a lot of different aspects, and doing it well is going to be really, really important. We're going to talk through a lot of different things today as it surrounds collaborating with others and building a good collaboration base as an instructional designer. We're going to talk through some of the benefits, some examples, and then we'll end with some collaboration tools and some good strategies to be able to use as an instructional designer. Collaboration is going to be a really big foundation. Even if you are a freelancer and you work with clients on a needed basis, you're still going to have to collaborate with them on what they need with their team. Or if you work within a larger organization that has lots of different departments that all work together, a large L&D team, a small L&D team, collaboration is really what's going to make sure that those projects get completed. They get completed on time, on budget, and everybody's happy to work together at the end of the day. The big goals here are that project collaboration will focus on, like I said, the social aspects of a project. It's how we bring in others and also how we connect with others through good communication, building the sense of teamwork, and also dealing with problems as they come up. Because there will be issues, there will be problems. How you do that with other people can become a big superpower for you as an instructional designer. If you've got to hunt down, track down the status of things, whoever you've passed the baton to, and you haven't gotten word back, or there's not really a lot of communication, it can drag down a project. It can feel like it doesn't move. It can feel like it's moving at a snail's pace, and that can really come in conflict with a strict deadline. It's important that there's transparency. It's important that there is a shared vision, that there are clear roles and responsibilities that we'll talk about. All of that is going to serve that the team works well together, builds a sense of efficiency, of productivity, and also safety together. Collaboration is going to be super important. It's not that you're trying to really hold hands, kumbaya, the whole thing, even though that would be nice to enjoy the people that you work with. But working with each other well and understanding and respecting the roles that you've outlined, that it's clearly communicated, and that that is all transparent and shared among everyone involved, can become very, very important to the process. Let's get into the why of collaboration. Most obvious, the answer to why would I need to collaborate? Why do I need to learn about good collaboration practices? Is that it really is essential for serving the project, for serving the desired outcomes of whatever you're trying to create, accomplish, or do. All of that is essential to be able to create something that is worthwhile, that meets the needs of the project, serves the team, serves the organization. But the only way to do that is to work together effectively. The essential reason why we collaborate well and why you would want to collaborate well with others on your ID projects is that you want to be able to have a completed project that meets all the desired outcomes that were outlined in your training needs analysis. It ensures that you stay in this continued alignment with everyone involved about what the project needs, what the expected outcomes are, and how you will move past any potential problems or issues. From a human perspective, this is also because it really helps you to build connections with other people in the workplace. Also building connections if you're a freelancer with clients, keeping those important connections with other instructional designers that you might work with. It really helps to build a network. If you can collaborate well and work well with each other, just makes the experience, the project, the goals that you're trying to reach together so much easier and better for future projects. Building on that, the benefits of good collaboration on an ID project is that you can problem-solve better together, you can bring in more diverse perspectives. When you collaborate, we make it safe for other people to really share their ideas, to work together, to move past any issues together. It really makes it a place of inclusion. It allows for other people to put in their insights and to learn. Especially as a new instructional designer or someone that is aspiring in this field, having that sense of it's okay to fail and working in collaboration with others, that becomes so important for how you view yourself and how you view your future success. Another key aspect I'll throw in here is, there's going to be a who part of who you will collaborate with and who's really important to collaborate with. These are these key individuals that are going to be really important for you to pull into the project and also to be able to lean on throughout the project as you design or develop any learning solution that might be important. Collaborating with a team like this will usually involve a larger group if you're on a really big team. It might be a very small group if you're in a smaller organization, or it might be just a few key individuals, say if you're a freelancer and you might lean on your client or some of your client's resources to be able to finish a project. You might be as a consultant be pulled into a working team to be able to slide in as someone that provides ID support to an existing team. There might be a lot of different avenues and maybe environments that you as an instructional designer might be pulled into, which again makes collaboration a very key part of what we do and how we pull in other people to make sure that the project is served as best as we can. The part of the who aspects that I'll bring in here, which just means all the people that might be involved, that you as an instructional designer, as someone that might be new to the field, or maybe you want to think about what your daily life might look like as an instructional designer, you might have to talk to and work with a lot of different people that might serve on your L&D team, might be outside your L&D team, might be your leader, but it might be just other stakeholders in the process. This could include a project manager. They might be getting schedules together, they might be looking at the timeline of a project to see that this is the deadline, this is when we want to have that live delivery date, this is when we need to have a facilitator scheduled, and when that might be. You really have to work with a project manager to be able to have that planning aspects of the project and making sure that it hits that important deadline, but subject matter experts, other instructional designers. If this is an e-learning course, having that designed and developed to be able to pass off to an e-learning developer, and also collaborating with that developer to make sure that whatever is created, that course fits the intended designs that will come with an extended amount of collaboration to be able and working with that other role to make sure that the project needs have been served. You could also work with, say, a marketing department. If you as the instructional designer might design something, you might pass it off to the marketing department to create all of the graphic materials or if someone is creating a video for you, you might have to pass that off and collaborate with other people that might be developing certain aspects of whatever you might be creating in that project. Larger projects with lots of moving pieces just means that you also really have to collaborate with all of those other people. That can be really tough, especially if a lot of those moving pieces don't necessarily work well or they just don't work in the same department. That can be the importance of collaboration becomes really, really a big deal. What I want to point out before we get too far along here is that collaboration is not micromanagement or what we would say is groupthink, or toxic groupthink is what I'll say, or completely driven by consensus. Just because it can be so frustrating if you are, let's say, a team of five and everyone has to weigh in on every animation, every graphic, every objective, and everything. It can be really tough to feel like things are just moving at such a slow, slow pace. That's where it's really important to establish those clear roles and responsibilities which we'll also talk about as well. Good collaboration does not mean that everything has to be discussed to the point of exhaustion or feel like that you are in this toxic groupthink situation where it feels like micromanagement. That's not good collaboration. It's also respecting the roles and responsibilities and the decision-making and the empowerment that comes along with each of the people that we just discussed and just walked through. Good collaboration involves empowering those individuals to make the decisions that they need to in their role and that they have the power to do so in their role. Let's get into the how. We've pulled in the who and who all you would need to collaborate with, and who might be important. Let's talk about the how and the strategies to be able to do that. First off, open communication is the big glaring light bulb that comes with collaboration. Open communication can involve a lot of things, how information is pushed out, how people can seek answers to problems, how they can come together and share those answers to problems. Whatever communication plan is important to that project, it's important that it's worked out in the beginning and it's shared among everyone involved. That can also include working out the communication channels, how you will actually share that information. Along with that plan and how you will find answers, how will you also communicate with each other? Will it be through Slack? Will it be through some instant messaging or always through email, or in some project management tool? That real-time communication, as long as that's worked out and clearly defined, that's what's going to make that collaboration very clear, and it's going to make it a lot easier for people to automatically know where to go when they have an issue, they flag a problem, or that they just have a question, do they drop it into a channel? If there's any confusion, it can be really tough to, number one, find the answer, and then make sure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to that communication plan. Like I said earlier, establishing clear roles and responsibilities are super important on a team. All those people that I listed as who would might be involved in your collaboration and in your role as an instructional designer, ensuring that each person understands where they stand, where they might be talking, where they might fall in the process, what they might contribute to, what tasks they will be assigned to, and what their decision-making power is when it comes to that task, makes everything a lot easier. It also helps to avoid that micromanagement when it feels like things are not necessarily moving in a great direction. Then keeping up with those status meetings. Status meetings can exist as planning, as planning meetings, weekly planning meetings. They can exist as daily stand-ups. It's whatever has been clearly defined, and it makes sense for everybody on that team that serves the project and it serves the project management that's involved. It can be anything as long as it's clear, and everyone's on the same page, and that it's respected and followed. Makes everything lots, lots easier. Another strategy is really building in a sense of teamwork. Collaboration and teamwork go hand-in-hand. We think of these two things as very, very closely related. You might collaborate, but not really feel a sense of teamwork and vice versa. Having these things together on the same page, having strong collaboration, feeling that sense of teamwork can build an inclusive environment. It can really help others to feel like, well, it's okay if I mess up sometimes. We all are working together. I know that my team will support me. I know that we're going to flag issues early. I also know it's safe to get feedback. As an instructional designer, it can be very tough at first to receive feedback on what we create. If you're in a team environment that makes it very safe to share ideas, or to want to move things around, or just change the look of something that you've created, getting that feedback can be a lot easier when it comes early. It also is in the spirit of, I want to serve the project, and I want to serve what we're doing above everything else. To work together to do that would be great, and I want to be able to serve that as well. Teamwork and a sense of teamwork becomes very, very important. But it also builds safety. It builds trust on a team, and it also makes it really able to share feedback. That can be really important as you might just miss something. You might miss the boat on something, and someone being able to give you that feedback is very important. Trusting that feedback and being able to trust the people that you collaborate with is very important as well. The last thing we'll touch on is collaboration tool. Email, instant messaging. There's a lot of instant messaging out there. We use Slack a lot. You can use Teams, Google Chat is a great one. But there are a ton out there. As remote employees, especially IDC, we lean on video conferencing tools a lot, where we wouldn't necessarily be in the office like some people, and as IDs, you might be more inclined to work remotely. Leaning on a video conferencing tool for the purpose of keeping communication really strong, making sure to continue having those conversations, sharing feedback, sharing status of a project, keeping things out in the open. Those communication tools become so vital to making sure that people feel a sense of teamwork and feel a sense of safety, even though they might be very far away and not necessarily meet in person all that often. Project management tools. This can be another collaboration tools. There's a ton out there. There can be Asana, Trello boards. We use Trello boards a lot, especially if you are an accelerator for our accelerator, ID and Tech Accelerator system. We would use Trello for managing projects and managing tasks for building all your portfolio assets. But there are many, many others. There's JIRA. We use ClickUp a lot at IDC. This is a visual representation of everything, every task, every little thing that might be involved in a project. So you might see certain people assigned to different tasks, and everyone on the team can be sure and see what this person is over, what they need to be reviewing, what they're doing right now, what they need to do, what they have done, and maybe passing the baton on to someone else. So having the project management tool, again, transparency and sharing that among everyone that would need to be involved in that project is a good way for everyone to see where they fall and also how everyone else in the team might be shaking out when it comes to their projects. It just helps to keep everything together, organized, but also be able to see that as collaborating with those tasks. We would also share files or keep things stored together like some cloud sharing. Like I said, if you're a remote team, you would really need to share stuff back and forth like all the time. We would use Google Drive, but there are a ton out there. There's Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive. It's just a good way to drop files in, and people are able to quickly go find what they need because it's been outlined, it's been clearly defined, and it's easy way to communicate between those files and in those places. Also, as you work together, as you build your collaboration, brainstorming and moving past issues or barriers together will also become very important. You can do that through, if you're a remote team, working virtually with a virtual whiteboard. There's one in Zoom. If you are video conferencing in Zoom, it's a good whiteboard. Lucidchart is a really nice way to see things visually together and collaborate. You can also use a Google Jamboard. It's a really awesome tool to just be able to get things out. If you've built those really foundations of good collaboration where people feel trusted and not micromanaged and feel like that they can collaborate together, this becomes very easy to do in that process. Having a team is just so essential. Feeling like you can grow and move to the position and move in and grow in a field becomes so exciting. It can be really fulfilling to work on a team. I know I feel like that with my team in collaborating the way that we do, and feeling like that we can work together and find solutions, and it feels really rewarding to complete projects together.