PM for L&D Professionals

Have you ever been asked to manage a learning and development project without much (or any) project management experience? Maybe you’ve wondered how to reduce the “I wish I’d known” moments and increase the number of “mission accomplished” ones.

As a certified project manager, I can assure you that applying a few simple project management principles can make your life easier, while adding value to your team, stakeholders, and the organization.

Manage the Project so it Doesn’t Manage You

Project management is essential to project success. It provides the foundation for all activities and tasks, ensuring clarity of purpose, budget, and timelines. By building a solid, realistic plan with your team at the outset you can ensure that the plan includes all the right people, doing all the right things, at the right time. You’ll have a way to track progress, identify when things might be going off track, develop and implement corrective action, and understand the impacts that changes could have on the final product, cost, or deadline for delivery.

A good plan is like having a crystal ball to it takes the guesswork out of project delivery and moves you from reacting and having the project manage you, to proactively managing your team and their work.

You Take It, I’ve Got It

Even if you don’t have a dedicated project manager on the team, investing in project management is worth it! Consider how much more effective (and happy!) your team could be by decreasing the number of miscommunications, misaligned expectations, or missed deadlines. The “plan, do, check, act” cycle can easily be applied to project management.

• Plan:  Create a plan for your work that includes all the tasks involved in delivering the final product, from meeting with the stakeholders to understand their requirements, building a team, designing and testing the solution, deploying the work product and evaluation. Make sure you include stakeholder check points, communication pieces and time for the team. Does each task have an owner, a timeframe for delivery and are the right resource(s) assigned to the work? Are you short on time and need to review the delivery date to ensure quality doesn’t suffer? Do you have enough funds to complete the work?
• Do:Do the work you planned and understand that any changes to scope or budget could have an impact on timelines, resources, or the quality of the final product. By understanding how the plan will need to change to accommodate a “last minute” addition you can ensure that the plan remains realistic and achievable while keeping your team on board.
• Check: Manage the elements of the project to ensure that things are on track. Is the budget being used as planned? Are the right people still doing the right work? Be sure to commit decisions to paper and get sign-off on all deliverables. Provide status reports that include issues and risks so that you can plan accordingly. Communicate with all stakeholders regularly and, when in doubt, communicate again!
• Act: This is where you can demonstrate agility, but within reason! Take corrective action but keep an eye on the initial purpose and requirements of the project. Can the team accommodate changes to scope? What is the impact on the timeline, budget and, perhaps most importantly, resources? How do any changes impact the evaluation planned for the learning and development deliverable? This is the chance to balance opportunities and risks while maintaining focus.

Apply the ABCs of Project Management

Align on roles, expectations, requirements, stakeholder involvement and evaluation methods. 

Be clear on scope, resources, budget, timelines, risks, success criteria, and the plan to transition the output to its operational “home."

Communicate the right messages to the right audience at the right time. The project manager is the expediter of effective workflow, but many stakeholders usually own parts of the communication effort.

Yes and No

Being an effective project manager can also mean saying “no” to changes that could jeopardize the desired outcomes. It can also mean setting boundaries in the face of incomplete or unclear requirements, wishy-washy approvals, and unclear task ownership. While not always easy, saying “no” can protect team morale and prevent burn-out, ensure high quality implementations, and projects that transition smoothly to operations.

Saying “no” to distractions can also mean saying “yes” to concentrating on the highest priority projects, knowing they can be delivered on time, on budget, with a focus on quality, meeting expectations for all stakeholders and ensuring that there is time and resourcing for evaluation and lessons learned so that the organization, and its people, are realizing the intended project benefits.

Regardless of the project size, applying effective project management can make all the difference to a learning and development initiative. A few simple techniques can go a long way to reducing the “I wish I’d known” moments, allowing you and your team more time to celebrate the “mission accomplished” successes.

What is your favorite project management tip or technique? If you are an I4PL member, sign in to add your comments!

Tags:  collaboration  L&D roles  leadership  project management  team building