Project Post-Mortem

My project post-mortem revolves around adapting an educational hybrid course to an online-only format. The deliverable: a year-long virtual course for high school seniors. The major stakeholder, the School District, had already acquired a course management system (Blackboard) to house the course itself. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)—teachers of the hybrid course—were hired to develop the units of study for a fall and a spring semester. The Project Manager (PM) had seven teams designing different courses; the PM also served as the Instructional Designer (ID) for each team. The ID was responsible for taking the SMEs’ development plans and designing the online content.

An initial meeting was held to acquaint everyone with the Work Plan which included a timeline. The meeting concluded with each team informally setting organizational methods for communicating and completing their work independently. Although this gave a certain freedom to the SMEs, it did not provide a platform for open and consistent communication, as Portny et al (2008), Allen and Hardin (2008), and Murphy (1994) suggest. PMs should know the organizational methods of a project and develop a Work Matrix so there is transparency with who is responsible for what and when—an Accountability Matrix could have helped us. Communication between team members was fine at the beginning, but waned until ceasing half way through the project. However, team members randomly communicated with the PM until the project was completed.

In addition to poor communication, SMEs had no formal training for online-only development. There was little information shared at the initial meeting about developing online learning activities, but SMEs were encouraged to include video and audio files rather than provide document after documents to be read and downloaded. Although our PM/ID made some adaptions to content for a better online translation, because of the volume of courses in the set time frame, much of what the SMEs developed was simply inserted into the online course without a lot of editing and revision. Two un-refined semesters developed by two non-communicating SMEs result in an error-filled series of downloadable documents that have no design uniformity students are expected to read. Knowing what I know now about the ID process (and the PM process) I am frustrated with how the project turned out—it could be so much better and this is the most frustrating thing now.

The end deliverables, in my opinion, are not designed with enough online instructional strategies nor do they meet the needs of the learners taking the course as much as they should. The course seems to me to be little more than a face-to-face class converted to an online environment through a myriad of documents shared through an online course management system with few distance learning tools incorporated. If we were to attack this project again, creating an Accountability Matrix and more open communication between team members and the PM/ID would be advisable. However, we did contribute to the project’s success as we completed the project on time, despite our little communication and a lack of online instructional design training. The project did meet approval from the School District and an Oversight Committee made up of high school teachers. Perhaps if the PM did not also take on the responsibility of the ID the project would be of higher quality.

References

Allen, S., & Hardin, P. C. (2008). Developing instructional technology products using effective project management practices. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 19 (2). 72–97.

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! (Laureate custom ed.). Baltimore: Laureate Education.

Murphy, C. (1994). Utilizing project management techniques in the design of instructional materials. Performance & Instruction, 33 (3). 9–11. 

Portny, S., Mantel, S., Meredith, J., Shafer, S., & Sutton, M. (2008). Project Management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.