Speaker 1: Welcome everyone to another episode of our Accelerated ID series. Today we're going to be talking about project management and my name is Shante Skildeger. I will be your host for this episode of our Accelerated ID series. So I have been the instructional designer. I've been the e-learning developer. I've been the instructional video specialist, even when I didn't know how to do instructional videos. I've been the LMS administrator. I've been the marketing person for all of our training sessions. I've been the facilitator. So I really had a lot. I really had the opportunity to pick up a lot of different experiences over the years by having an instructional design role that really incorporated a lot of different L&D elements, which makes it fun for me to share with you all because I've got so many different experiences that you can learn from. So by the time we finish this session today, you will know a little bit more information about the definition of project management, what are the different types of methodologies, and what are some of the common tools that we use as project managers, and what project management looks like in learning and development. So when you see that L&D, we're talking about learning and development. And it might be surprising to you that you are here because you're an aspiring instructional designer to hear me talk about project management. But you very much wear a big project management hat as an instructional designer. So we're going to talk about some of the roles and tasks that you will either own or you will manage. And then we're going to talk about some of the specific skills that you need in order to manage projects. The official definition of project management, it's the process of planning, organizing, and controlling resources. So every day I plan my morning, every day I organize those activities that I have to do. I think about all the different resources. And in this case, it's people resources, it's breakfast food resources, it's lunch food resources, making sure I've got gas in the car for drop-off. So all those different things. So when we talk about project management, we really have these buckets. It's a structured approach to planning something, planning out something, planning out a project, planning out an event. It's resource management. Resources could be people, tools, room, dates, right? These can all fall into that bucket of resources. Risk management. What are the potential barriers? What are the potential blocks? What's the risk if this happens or doesn't happen? It's collaborating with other people, other people on the team, external stakeholders, stakeholders in other departments. It's quality assurance, meaning going through that review process, right? So that's just project management in general. Now you might be surprised to find that in L&D it looks exactly the same, right? So whenever we have our structured approach to planning, that could be one of our instructional system design models that we follow, like Addy or Sam. It could be we go through that training needs analysis activity and we come up with a different bunch of different requirements. We sit down, we map out all the different tasks that are related to the project. It could be managing the L&D team, who are the key stakeholders, who are our subject matter experts, or if you are also responsible for the launch, it could be ensuring that you have a room available in order for you or another facilitator to lead that learning experience once it's ready. Risk management of, you know, like what happens if I miss this date? What are the repercussions? Or what, you know, I need to be mindful that certain members of the team might go out on vacation, so I need to plan around that or I put that project at risk. Collaborating with your team members, collaborating with your subject matter experts, collaborating with your business stakeholders. For those of you who haven't heard the term stakeholder or business owner, what that really means is the business owner is typically the person who requested the project. That could be somebody within the company that you work with, so it could be, you know, one of the VPs in the organization says, hey Shante, we need to create a learning experience on effective communication for with our new clients, right? So the person that asked for that training is your business owner, and then stakeholders are all the people that have a vested interest in the success of that project. A business owner, by the way, could also be someone that's external to the company, so if you freelance or you end up with your own agency or if you are a company that supports other clients, you know, that are outside of your organization and they requested training, these are all people that you would classify as business owners. And then, like with everything, quality assurance. We need to make sure that our work is good. We proof it, we check it, we test it, we try to break it, and as a person or an instructional designer that's wearing an L&D hat, you own all of these different activities. Now, if there's anything here that surprises you, excites you, tell me about it in the chat so that I can take a look. Now, whenever we're talking about project management, there are three primary methodologies that we hear about the most. Now, you could go out and google and find different methodologies, but these are the ones that are the most present. So we have waterfall project management. Way back in the day, whenever I was in college, I had a co-op position, and this is where I actually fell in love with project management. And back then, waterfall was the main staple methodology, so that is what I grew up in and learned in, right? So waterfall is, you could equate it to building a house, right? You have to do one thing and before the other thing, and it's just like a series of steps. So you have to build the foundation, you have to build the frame, then you close in the frame, you do the wiring, you do the plumbing, right? So waterfall is, it's a linear process. You do one, you do two, you do three, you do four, and once you commit to that project, those are the steps. It's a pretty rigid project management process. Agile, on the other hand, is more iterative. It's flexible, it's dynamic, it can change as new information comes in or new priorities come in, so things can shift. So just the name itself, agile, lets you know that it's meant to be nimble, it's meant to be flexible. It's absolutely not supposed to be rigid in the same way that waterfall is. It's not date-driven. In truth, we could have an entire session on the differences between waterfall and agile and maybe sometime we will. And then the third main methodology that we often hear about is this lean project management. Sometimes you hear about things like lean six sigma. Now this one doesn't really pop up for us too much in L&D unless you work in that lean six sigma kind of space, but it is worthwhile to just to be familiar with this terminology. Now as L&D professionals, we often either work in waterfall or in a hybrid of waterfall and agile project management. So the reason that we either lean towards waterfall or we lean in this hybrid is because while the rest of the organization, for example, may be agile, your IT department may be working in agile, all of your other support departments may be working in agile where they're flexible and nimble. L&D often gets tasked with things like, hey Shante, we're going to be launching this new financial software on April the 15th. In order to support that launch, we need to have learning experiences or training sessions that train our staff how to use that financial software. So as soon as they give us a date that we need to work from, that is putting us more in that lean towards waterfall. Because in the agile environment, I would have all the information that I need, all the resources where I could prioritize everything, look at how long each of these different tasks take, what are the dependencies, and then in turn give an estimate by when I could have it done. But the truth is in L&D, we're often date driven, which either puts us in a hybrid format or in that waterfall format. All right, so what are the types of tasks or responsibilities that you are responsible for whenever you are an L&D project manager? I do want to pause for a second and just clarify because this could be confusing because I'm using terms like L&D project manager, instructional designer. The truth is you may work in an organization who doesn't actually have an L&D project manager role. They may never even use the term project manager. It's just a quiet assumption or expectation that you can project manage your projects. Just like in the morning here in the house, whenever I am responsible for organizing and coordinating all these morning activities, no one walks around and says, hey Shante, thank you for project managing our morning or hey Shante, we expect you to project manage our day. That just doesn't happen. The labels that I get in the morning are either wife or honey or mommy, right? Nobody calls me a project manager and the same is true for you as an instructional designer. A lot of times you're not going to be called an instructional designer or sorry, you're not going to be called a project manager. It's just an expectation of your role that you know how to do these things, which is why we need to be talking about it and educating our future instructional designers so that they can step into these roles and know how to do these things. But there are dedicated roles to L&D project management that you could pursue as well. So it's good to know that it can be a standalone role or it's just an expectation. It's one of those many hats that you wear as an instructional designer. All right, so what are you responsible for as an instructional designer who is managing L&D projects? You have to manage that client stakeholder relationship. You are responsible for communicating to the client or the stakeholder. You are responsible for checking in. You are responsible for making sure that you are in alignment with your stakeholders and clients and business owners, as well as keeping in alignment. Because at the beginning of a project, you can align, but things happen along the way that change up the project. So you have to keep re-engaging them to keep that alignment in, right? You're responsible for checking in with them to make sure that they complete reviews on time. You are responsible for leading the project team sometimes, if you are lucky enough to have a project team. It is also very common for you to be the totality of the project team. It's you, yourself, and no one else. But sometimes you get to work with a team. So if you have a team, again, it's about communicating with the team, keeping everyone in alignment, managing expectations, clearing blocks, making sure that everyone on the team is delivering their work outputs on time and on budget, and then collaborating, right? And I did see that scope creep. Someone mentioned scope creep over here. I should have put that on here, and I didn't, but that is a huge one. Yes, you are absolutely responsible for managing scope creep. And for those of you that are new to project management, and you may never have heard of scope creep, what that is, is that at the beginning of the project, we all align on, like, what is the scope of the project? And when we say scope of the project, we simply mean, like, what are the requirements of this project? What am I agreeing that I can create and deliver by this deadline? And, you know, if it's 10 things, then 10 things are in scope. So as the project manager, we want to make sure that our client or stakeholder or even our team members on our project aren't going, coming to us and going, oh, Shantae, wouldn't it be great if we also created these facilitator expectations? Now we're at item 11. Oh, Shantae, wouldn't it be great if we also created this quick little intro video? Now we're at task 12. Wouldn't it be great, Shantae, if we did, like, this little mini training to train our internal staff? Now we're at task number 13, right? So 11, 12, and 13 are examples of scope creep. They are outside of the original scope of the project. So that's a really good call out. We are also responsible for managing our subject matter experts. Our subject matter experts are our topic experts. So we need to help them either give us the content that we need or we need to work with them to pull the content out of them that we need. And, of course, we have to work with them to whittle it down to that need to know very important information. And again, it's communication with them. It's delivering on time. It's making sure that they're not going way off on a tangent and then requiring a whole bunch of rework, which increases our budget and increases our timelines. Okay. So we are also responsible for project tools, making sure that everybody on the team has access to the tools that they need. That could be technology. It could be rooms. It could be video equipment. Anything, really. It is making sure that all the tasks of a project are defined. So we define what it is that needs to happen, who is responsible for making it happen, and by when it needs to happen. We're also responsible for draft reviews, right, which is that quality assurance piece where either we go through and we do the reviews of the content or we ask another member of the team to do it. And we get our subject matter experts and our clients or our stakeholders to do those reviews as well. It's also communicating with our facilitators and our instructors who may lead one of our instructor-led trainings that we create. So again, you're hearing this word communication a lot, right? It is working with facilitators to set up pilots, pilot the content, review the content, check the experiences, check to make sure that we have enough engagement, make sure that the room works for this instructor-led piece. And then if it is an e-learning, then it is working with our LMS administrators, LMS meaning our learning management system administrators, to have them upload the content by a certain day, make sure that they know which audience needs to complete this learning that we've created, if there is a requirement, and then by what day that that needs to happen. Communication is the number one thing, in my opinion, that can make or break a project, right? And I often say that even bad news is good news when it is communicated early. So we have to be so on top of communicating, like, if we do this, then this, or yes, we can do that, but here's that, or just pushing out like, hey, so here's where we are, this project, this morning, as a matter of fact, before my mommy morning project management job started, I was in Slack, and I put out seven different points with a client of like, here's where this piece is, here's where this piece is, we need to pause this, because now we're going to add this piece, which then is a dependency. So communication is super, super important. It's one of your superpowers as an instructional designer who is leading projects. Effective L&D project management requires, so some of this is going to be a recap, okay? So it's going to require that you identify the task to be completed, who's responsible for those tasks, how long each of those tasks will take, then you have to prioritize that work, right? Because some things have to happen before other things. I often give closed captioning or voiceover as an example. Before you can have the closed captions, you need to have the script, right? So you have to write the script before you can do any closed captioning. Or before you can have somebody do the voiceover, you have to have that script for them to work from. So again, you have to write the script. So the dependencies are the things that have to happen in order for something else to happen. Then you need to communicate project updates and issues. And honestly, we're about to talk about the tools for project management. If you do a good job of using your tools, your tools do a lot of communicating for you so that you don't have to sit down and write a whole bunch of emails or communicating status updates. Your tools allow somebody to open up your toolboard and go, oh, that project's in review. Done. Communication is. It's ready for review. And then, of course, we're going to use our tools, which we are now going to talk about. So some of the more popular tools for project management are tools like Trello, Asana. Jira is by its hands down my favorite tool. It's got well, I won't get into it, but it's my favorite tool. You can also use Monday.com. You can use ClickUp and you can use Basecamp. In my everyday work life right here today, I use Trello. I use ClickUp and I use Basecamp. With a former employer, I use Jira. I tried to get some other folks, some other clients to move into Jira. They didn't. They went with ClickUp. So we do a lot of ClickUp usage around here. Another client uses Monday.com. We use Trello in our instructional design and tech accelerator system and certificate program. I use Trello to manage. Sometimes I volunteer with different organizations and I'm responsible for managing all the pieces. I use Trello for it. It's easy. So a lot of these tools make it real easy for you to communicate and collaborate. Many of these have free trials. If you want to pick them up and try them out, Trello has a free forever plan. You just can't have more than 10 boards if you want to go check that out. Basecamp is also free. It has a premium plan but it also has a free plan that makes it really nice to use. If you have questions, just know that project management is one of my favorite skills or I don't know if it's just one of my favorite things to do. I really love breaking down projects. I love estimating how long things are going to take. I love holding the line and the accountability for it even though sometimes I feel like I need a bulletproof vest because it doesn't always get received well whenever you're holding the line on projects. But whenever project management is really done well, like the whole project experience for the whole team and the organization is so much better and you deliver a better product without things getting super super pushed down the line. you