Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Agile Instructional Development Project Management

I've gotten the opportunity to do a commercial level project with two really fine interns. This is my first attempt at an Agile-managed project. First, for Agile experts out there; I am not one of you. However, I want to gain knowledge in this area. I think it has a great deal of potential for solving a problem that one Army School's Chief Knowledge Officer told me about. He said that too many e-learning products are fielded on time but contain information that is out of date. There are other reasons....but I digress.
The purpose of this post is to share how I have begun organizing an instructional development project. We are only two weeks in and working only part time. To set up, the interns and I listed the tasks we needed to do on a chart. We used the card lay-down technique to determine the effort for each task, set a priority for them and established 2 weeks as our interval for a burn-down chart. Here are pictures:











Nice but nowhere near the level of detail of a software project. However, as the team discussed the way forward in out "stand-up" meeting, it occurred to me that we should list those items of content that we now believe must be covered. Then, we can prioritize those pieces of content very much like a software team prioritizes program features. We may find gaps there, or we may find content that we can save for a revised version.

I'm still thinking about this, but it seems worth trying for the first time.