Estimating Costs and Allocating Resources - Week 5

Our task this week is to search for two resources for allocating resources and estimating the costs associated with an Instructional Design Project. I found several resources that cover this subject with guidelines and tips as well as budgeting information that came from practical experience.  I will share two of these resources for the purpose of this assignment.
 
Clark, D. (2010). Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design.  Retrieved from:   http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html
This site is created by Donald Clark who is an experienced Instructor and Instructional Designer. His blog post, Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design started with an introduction about Budgeting and how learning activities are budgeted in a wide variety of ways based on whom you work for. Next the post is listing examples of various training cost estimates and a great way to estimate the training development hours that are required for instructional lead, web based, e-learning and interactive multimedia instructions.  Finally, he closes with a case study from Verizon Communications.

Greer, M. (2009). Estimating instructional development (ID) time. Retrieved from: http://michaelgreer.biz/?p=279 .

This is a web-Published Article by Michael Greer, the author of an important resource for our Project Management Class, Project Management Minimalist. The article is one of many from the PM resources of Greer’s site. In this article he is sharing his insights about estimating the time required for instructional development projects and how to rely on past work and experience rather than using the common rules for development time.

Blog Assignment: Communicating Effectively

This week, our Project Management class’s blog assignment is to view the multimedia program “The Art of Effective Communication.” I observed the same message delivered in three modalities: e-mail, voice mail, and face-to-face. My reflections of how I interpreted the message will be as follows:

Email:

The text in the message is so friendly as if an employee is politely begging for an ETA report from her manager or supervisor or a higher rank employee, she looks worry and impatient . She is scarcely or with hesitation asking him to send the report soon without any firm deadline. Jane is desperately asking Mark about when he thinks he can send the report or even the data that will help her complete her report by a separate email. Actually, in this message, I can tell that Jan has successfully applied all what Dr. Stolovitch, (2011) mentioned in “Communicating with Stakeholders” video about “written communication should begin with a clear purpose, state the situation, include possible solutions, specify the form that the response is required to take and keep tone friendly and respectful”.

Voicemail:

The voicemail tone gave me a feeling of a team leader or an equivalent teammate asking with a polite and friendly tone for the report.  The tone shows more confidence than the email and I can feel a some level of commanding tone in saying words like Soon and the sentence “get the report sent over to me”.

Face to Face:

The video tone and gestures and body language confirm an employee request for the report from a colleague with a neutral tone neither commanding nor begging but politely asking, indicating the urgency and reminding of a report dead times.

The factors that influenced each message perception can be defined as follows:

For   Email format: Only the text

        Voicemail: Both words and tone

        Face to face communication:  Words, tone, and body language.

I believe all three methods are effective ways of communication if the right tools are used. However I feel that face to face communication is more effective and better way of communication; it would great if it will be followed by a formal written request as well.

Dr. Stolovitch, (2011) in “Communicating with Stakeholders” video stated that ”Effective communication is influenced by the spirit and attitude, tonality and body language, timing, and the personality of the recipient. Some communication is delivered orally as informal but we need to make sure that important communication is best delivered live and then followed with a documented statement”.

References

Dr. Stolovitch, (2011). Communicating with Stakeholders. Retrieved from Walden University eCollege.
Laureate Education. (2011). [Online]. The Art of Effective Communication. Retrieved from Walden University eCollege.
Portny, S., Mantel, S., Meredith, J., Shafer, S., Sutton, M., & Kramer, B. (2008). Project Management: Planning, scheduling and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Learning from a Project “Post –mortem”

 

Project “Post-mortem” is one way to learn best practices and avoid mistakes on a future project through reviewing the results and activities from a project that has been completed ( Walden University, 2011).

Last year I’ve completed as a project manager a project for building three technical courses for a major customer. Each course should include text book, presentation materials, practical activities, daily quizzes, and pre / post assessments. The customer representative was a PhD SME with over 35 years of experience. He gave me one page of course outlines for each course and asked for an initial feedback including:

1- Instructional designer and / or Instructor resume.

2- Detailed course objectives, outlines, chapters’ brief draft summaries.

3- Proposed time-line for completing each course.

After submitting all required information, we agreed to start the execution phase for each course. Our customer requested from us to send him chapter by chapter to revise before proceeding. I’ve started the project with two out of town teams and one in town ID and I was liaising between them and the client. This job appeared to be a nightmare; each chapter took at least four rounds of revisions before it gets signed off. The customer turned to be so picky and used to take a very long time in revising the material, correcting the grammar and sentences before even the technical information and only considers his point of view whether right or wrong. With this situation in mind, off course, we missed all timelines and we took almost double the required scheduled time to complete the job. The customer refused to compensate us for the extra work and he actually accused us of being the reason behind delay. The project ended up with a successful delivery however my company suffered a high financial burden from this project. 

Today, when I look back at this agreement I realize how the project management course could have helped me to better manage that project and complete it within budget as well. As described by Portny et al, (2008), pp. 85, I managed to provide the customer with a brief description of the tasks to be performed and the qualifications, skills and knowledge that my ID consultants have.

However, I never had a Statement of Work (SOW) completed and signed from both parties, to generally describe work assignments for the project. I also believe that I would definitely have had less problems and better project time management if I had the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) in place and agreed upon with the customer. WBS is an organized detailed and hierarchical representation of all work to be performed in the project. For my project , it was exactly what I needed to eliminate the multiple draft revisions and save a lot of time. In spite the fact that some people look at detailed the WBS and decide that they make projects more complex than they really are, my project is a clear example that, by clearly portraying all aspects of the work to be done, WBS actually simplifies the project (Portny et al, 2008) and reduce conflicts with the client.

Also one of learned lessons was that I, being the project manager, should have had a “kick off meeting” to clarify deliverables, roles and responsibilities of team members, obtain specific commitment of each team member to complete assigned tasks according to schedule and budget constraints, and make sure all team members have what they need to start work (Greer, 2010).

References

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! (Laureate custom ed.). Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Walden University, (2011). Blog Assignment: Learning from a Project “Post- mortem”.