Project Management Training
A 20-minute training booklet for consulting employees without a project management background, providing essential techniques to enhance efficiency and ensure successful project outcomes.
Tools： Articulate Rise/Canva/Figma/Photoshop
My Role: Instructional Designer & User Researcher
Time: April/2024 - 4 weeks
Design Process
Problem
One IT consulting Company has experienced occasional delays in meeting project deadlines compared to the previous quarter, which has impacted client satisfaction in a few instances. Communication between project teams and stakeholders has occasionally lacked clarity, resulting in slight misalignments in objectives and minor delays in task completion.
My Solution
I created a 20-minute training booklet by using multimedia for consulting employees without a project management background, providing essential techniques to enhance efficiency and ensure successful project outcomes.
Analyze
Training Need Analysis
Here are the results summary of the interviewing with two software engineering.
-Limited Knowledge of Project Management: Many employees, with backgrounds in computer science, have limited familiarity with project management principles, creating gaps in their ability to manage tasks efficiently.
-Over-reliance on Project Managers: Employees tend to rely heavily on project managers to maintain workflow, which can result in bottlenecks and inefficiencies when project managers are unavailable or overloaded.
In this case, the root cause is a lack of knowledge and skills rather than factors like motivation, making the development of an online training program an effective solution.
Learner Analysis
The employees' project management skills vary: some are highly proficient, capable of managing complex projects, while others have only basic knowledge, such as organizing meetings or tracking tasks. The complexity of the training will depend on each employee's current skill level, prior experience, and motivation to enhance their project management capabilities.
Action Mapping
I consulted a software engineer at that IT consulting company as my subject matter expert (SME) to develop the action map and establish the overall goal for this project. We decided to measure progress by monitoring whether employees can successfully complete a team project using sufficient project management skills without falling behind. We then identified the specific actions needed to achieve this goal and created one action map to visualize the result.
Learner Objectives:
After determining the required actions and aligning the activities, we established the following learning objectives to ensure better alignment in content design.
1. Describe the fundamental concepts of project management and its importance to project team members
2. Apply effective task prioritization, communication skills, and time management strategies to address unexpected challenges and meet project deadlines.
3. Identify common task and time management challenges within project teams and propose strategies to overcome them.
4. Apply targeted communication strategies to improve teamwork and collaboration within a project team
Learner Testing:
We conducted two rounds of learner testing, focusing on both usability and learning.
Here are the key result summary:
1. The learning modules should involve more engaging design elements as it is a bit text-heavy.
2. The scenario-based content can be more detailed.
Future
In the short term, we can create a quick survey to determine if learners find the training useful. In the long term, it would be valuable to assess whether teamwork performance improves among employees after the project management training and to evaluate if we meet our business goal of reducing project delays caused by project management-related issues by 50% in the next quarter.