Managing your eLearning Design Project

Often, eLearning projects come with many moving pieces. Like living things, a project can grow, and sometimes even small tasks can seem like managing a project with titanic proportions.

When I think of getting a handle on my projects, the term triage comes to mind. Triage in medical terms refers to the process of assigning degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to determine the order of treatment for a large number of patients or casualties. Hopefully, we won’t have casualties on our projects, but there are tips to borrow from how emergency room physicians handle the panic and overwhelm that can assail an emergency room.

For this post, I’m going to define triage in eLearning as the art of ranking project tasks and deliverables to reduce their capacity to negatively impact your project outcomes.

Triage in eLearning is the art of ranking project tasks and deliverables to reduce their capacity to negatively impact your project outcomes.

Why We Need to Manage eLearning Projects

If you fail to manage your project correctly, it can cost your organization time and money. Worst case scenario, you get a terrible reputation and undermine the growth of your company. So, there is the need to manage your project. Project planning goes further than assigning tasks, setting timelines, and tracking deadlines. You might have to manage stakeholders, subject matter experts, multiple teams, etc. In the end, you can consider your project is successful if you meet all your objectives and deliverables on time within budget or make a profit. Projects differ in complexity and so having a management strategy in place is critical to success.

How to Triage Your eLearning Design

Press Pause

First of all, if you are hurtling toward task paralysis. Pause, stop, halt. I have a hard time starting when I am overwhelmed. When this happens, I find every aspect of the project tedious, even the parts I usually find FUN. Take a step away from the tasks. An hour, a day, whatever you can afford to do without completely derailing your project. Stopping to calm yourself deliberately signals your brain to shift from panic mode. When you get out of the panic zone, it’s time to make a plan.

Triage

Triage mode is where you go. Your goal is to avoid approaching every task on your to-do list with the same level of intensity. You probably know from experience what aspect of your project will be your most significant stressor. Whether content gathering, instructional design, storyboarding, development and production, quality assurance, or integration and delivery, you can guess until you find out if you are new to project design. But truth be told, every project will be different,

Next, order your tasks along these lines:

• Red – Project threatening

• Yellow – Serious but not threatening

• Green – No threat and maybe fun to do.
  Now, this can feel like kindergarten for Instructional Designers, but if it helps, why not?

These broad categories of eLearning project management: planning, content gathering, instructional design, storyboarding, development and production, quality assurance and integration, and delivery have a lot of branches, and you might want to break them down depending on what you are required to do for your project. Break it down into as much or as little as you need to help you triage.

Here is a sample of some aspects of a design I triaged.

Your triage may vary from project to project, and what one instructional designer may find easy may be a challenge for you, but it is your triage.

Move the Needle

You will want to focus your efforts on what will move the needle the most to complete your project. Martial and deploy your arsenal into everything on your red list. You don’t want to approach anything on your green list like it’s a red threat. If the sky is falling on a red task, the sky is genuinely falling, but if a green task tries to bring the sky down, just chant, I know my reds.

Now, this is not to say you should let the tasks on your green list slide. Just don’t let them add to any overwhelm so you can concentrate your efforts on your most challenging tasks.

Apply Systems Thinking

Find ways to make your tasks more manageable, especially if they are tasks you will repeat on the current or future project. You don’t want to leave any aspect of your design process that you can automate unautomated.

Use templates instead of always creating from scratch. Store all the material you often use within reach or in a file, so you don’t expend energy looking for it if you need to go back to any part of your design.

Lump similar tasks together. On my most recent project, I created all my feedback slides at the same time. I did the same for my results slides.

If you can, set a day to answer project-related emails or meet with SMEs. As often as you can, batch similar tasks, so you are not constantly shifting gears in your brain and resituating yourself during tasks. Create checklists for your project designs that you can use for other projects. You could have a checklist for creating branching scenarios and another for creating linear scenarios. You could have a list you check to ensure you’ve included or at least considered particular assessment or instructional strategies in your design.

Do Deep Work

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Eliminate distractions, especially when you need to focus on your red tasks. Reduce the need to use your willpower to fight distractions by removing them.

You might need to say no to some items on your to-do list for a while so you can hunker down on what’s important. You might need to delegate some tasks so you can focus on your red tasks better. Even in a team of one, you don’t have to do everything yourself.

Deep work can be draining, so remember to take time off to work on your other tasks, and hopefully, you can enjoy cycling between them to prevent project fatigue.