Freezing Action - eLearning module
Project Management
The development of this project was broken up into four key phases: Design, Alpha Development, Beta Development, and the Gold Development. At the start of the project, I met with the two other designers on this product in order to get a sense of what work had previously been completed and what we needed to do in order to successfully develop this product. As the Project Manager, I began by creating a timeline (see left for a snapshot) for all the milestones that we needed to meet and a schedule of all the team meetings necessary to complete this project.
Once a timeline had been settled on and the design document was completed we began the Alpha Phase of this project. During this phase I took the lead on the weekly team meetings to ensure that development was running smoothly and to see if there were any issues that needed to be resolved. One major issue that our team ran into was that the Developer was using Adobe Captivate as the authoring tool and was experiencing a variety of technical challenges that made it difficult to work with. As a direct result of the issues that our Developer was having, our team decided that it would be best to move to the Lectora authoring tool to continue the development of this product. Other than the need to migrate from one authoring tool to another, there were only small challenges that we encountered but were able to successfully resolve.
After the Alpha Prototype was completed our team reviewed the peer feedback that we received and implemented the recommendations as we felt necessary. Once our team completed the review we moved on to the Beta Development stage which mostly consisted of refining the product further in order for the product to be submitted for a second round of peer review.
Once our team received feedback from the second round of peer reviews we moved into the final Gold Development stage with minimal revisions needed. In this final stage of development our team was focused on fixing any bugs with user interactions or small changes to the formatting of the content.
Takeaways
This project proved to be an excellent chance for me to develop and gain confidence in my skills as a Project Manager. It showed me that no matter how meticulously a project is planned, challenges are bound to come up and I need to be able to think quickly in order to resolve the issue to avoid delays in the development of the project. In addition, I was able to further develop my skills and confidence as an Instructional Designer by offering alternative solutions for content presentation to create a more meaningful experience for the users.
