Getting the Ball Rolling on New Projects

February 13th, 2021

For the past few weeks my team of four have been working diligently to get our project off the ground. We spent a few meetings hashing out a team charter to ensure we had procedural failsafes organized in the event things got hairy. I must admit, I was overwhelmed by talking through these hypothetical situations. I then thought back to my undergrad days of being stuck completing the bulk of projects due to miscommunication, timeline shifts, and poor group management. And so, my first piece of advice when standing up a project: never skip creating a team charter.

Once we were ready to go, we set up a few initial meetings with our client. We’re juggling 4 different time zones so when2meet.com really saved the day. It allowed us to quickly mark the times we were available and send out a Zoom invite within a few days.

I know everyone is absolutely over Zoom meetings in the age of COVID but I personally love its features. We can run a meeting while recording. This means we can go back and listen to crucial conversations and pull exact quotes without worrying too much about writing everything down during the meeting. Even cooler, Zoom now sends audio transcripts of cloud recorded meetings. I’ve used these transcripts to find the exact part of the conversation I’m looking for and then pressing play to hear the quotes.

Getting the correct data through interviews and extant data has been a large portion of getting our project off the ground. We must make sure that the gap exists and that intervention we choose closes the gap. On top of that, it needs to meet the organizations needs and support their learners. My team completed a learner analysis and a training requirement analysis to back these goals. Within the learner analysis we discussed ways to incorporate learner profiles with Bloom’s Taxonomy and Gagne’s Nine Events. This gave us some needed clarity on how to begin the develop phase of ADDIE.

Starting new projects is always daunting but it is always rewarding. With each new project a learn a little bit more about myself, working with others, and creating A+ instructional design learning objects.