Collaborate. Illuminate. Iterate.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been working with two colleagues on an instructional design project as part of our graduate coursework. In this short amount of time, we have jumped head first into engaging with our client as well as navigating through the typical team formation stages and project management challenges, all while in a virtual environment. For these early days, we’ve focused on kicking off the project and front end analysis techniques, such as a Training Requirement Analysis, Task Analysis, and Learner Analysis (check out my earlier blog post here to learn more about each of these ID tools). Along the way, we had a few stumbles but through our collaboration techniques, we managed to shed some light on our project goal so that we could take a few steps forward to develop a valuable solution for our client. In this blog post, I’d like to share a couple of our challenges and the strategies we used to overcome these obstacles.
Challenge #1: Virtual Team Formation & Project Management
Given that none of our project team members are geographically co-located, our first challenge was to quickly come together to form a cohesive, well-functioning team in a virtual environment. Luckily, IDs are collaborative by nature, and we leveraged a variety of strategies and tools to facilitate our team formation. Developing our Project Team Charter together was a great way to explicitly call out our preferred communication avenues and align on specific technology tools that we would be using throughout the engagement. For example, we are leveraging Google Doc features to enable asynchronous work without sacrificing transparency. See Figure 1 for one instance of this strategy in action.
We also strove to effectively use any time we did have together. By using structured agendas and clear roles and responsibilities, we were able to use a “divide-and-conquer” strategy while also supporting each other throughout project work. Over the last two weeks, we used any leftover time from our client meetings to have a mid-week internal team checkpoint so that we could align on our path forward.
Challenge #2: Project Scope Confusion
The early deliverables for this project are based on using front end analysis techniques to understand the performance gap (see Figure 2 for how we outlined our understanding of the performance gap) and associated contextual factors. We set off to draft a list of key interview questions (see Figure 3 for an excerpt from our Learner Analysis, outlining a subset of our interview questions) to collect the necessary information from our client and subject matter expert (SME). However, after a few discussions with our client and SME as well as a few internal team discussions, we realized that our understanding of our project scope was clear as…. mud. As a team, we each individually admitted to one another that we were all just a little bit confused on our project scope. From there, we quickly jumped into action. Luckily, we had already started building rapport with our client and SME by this point; rapport which helped us initiate an honest conversation with them to seek clarification on the scope of the project. The resulting discussion and supporting documentation provided by the client were invaluable as we course-corrected and adjusted our front-end analysis artifacts (Training Requirements Analysis, Learner Analysis, and Task Analysis) appropriately.
As someone with a background in Industrial Engineering and has spent quite a bit of time in IT and software development, I’ve seen my share of those who have embraced Agile principles and those who cringe when they hear the words “sprint” or “ceremonies”. I, personally, stand at the midpoint of these two camps. I believe that Agile, as a mindset, can be powerful in team-based work and solutions can “evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams” (Agile Alliance, n.d.). I have, however, also witnessed and experienced situations wherein Agile practices are adopted as strict rules without any consideration to the organizational constructs within which they must succeed.
When it comes to the world of instructional design, embracing agile principles based on iteration and continuous improvement comes naturally. Though our team’s initial confusion on scope may have felt like a huge stumble or maybe even a mini-failure, our quick action to seek clarification from our client and SME not only illuminated the project boundaries, but I believe it also continued to strengthen our rapport and trust with each other. Though it took one small step backwards, we adapted, pivoted our approach, and took several steps toward our ultimate goal: delivering valuable instructional design solutions for our client.
Agile Alliance. (n.d.). Agile 101. https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/