THE Inspired | Cynthia “Cyndy” Guillen, MBA, PMP, CSM

Designing instruction requires an ID to either assimilate a team or work with an existing team to design and develop the instructional solutions. Strong communication is the factor that successful teams are defined by. The ID team should seek to understand all angles and take responsibility for being heard and understood. Strong communication is the gateway to building a collaborative team. The ID is just one role on an instructional solutions project or learning program, other roles include: the project manager, editor, graphic designer, and instructors. A good instructional team will establish their vision, mission, and milestones for getting a project done.

Performance management relies on a strong collaborative team environment. A collaborative environment is defined by these qualities: a common goal; trust; clearly defined roles; open communication; diversity; and milestones. Effective teams are defined by their work together towards a common goal. Trust is important, members must trust each other if they are to work together successfully. Clearly defined roles and being familiar with everyone’s roles creates efficiency and flexibility. Miscommunication and lack of communication can create discord and derail the success of the team, it’s best to over-communicate as much as possible. It’s important to take advantage of team diversity, the best teams try to learn as much as you can from others. Lastly, high performing teams measure and monitor their team’s outcomes and deliverables and regularly check-in to maintain group dynamics and reflect on past performance.

For initiating an instructional design team, it is best to build phases and milestones into your plan such as, a kick-off meeting, analysis, regular team meetings, design, development, production, testing, and evaluation. The kick-off meeting is an opportunity for the client and instructional design team to meet and state the scope of work. The analysis phase occurs to gather details and requirements to understand the needs for the course and determine the learning objectives. Next, design and prototypes can be produced to demonstrate to the client the team’s vision and instructional approach. Once the team has consent from the client they can begin development. After development and before launching to learners, the product or program should go through testing to confirm it meets the requirements established by the client and team. The production phase is the release of the learning opportunity to an audience. Evaluating learners to determine effectiveness and gather feedback is important and can be used to inform future work.

• ID team’s have a lot to keep track of, they must manage the client relationship, the production schedule, communications and evaluations. In my role as an ID project manager I’ve found the following tools help us to be successful.
  Establish a cadence for external meeting with the client and internal prep-meetings before client meetings
• Create a master slide deck for meetings that can be updated with the agenda and topics for each client meeting
• Become familiar and practice using different computer platforms and phone conferencing applications. ID teams have to present frequently to clients and the platforms and conferencing systems are not always intuitive. Knowing how to use Macs, Microsoft, and Google products will alleviate a lot of frustration
• Establish a cloud based platform for collaboration such as, Google and Microsoft 365, they allow multiple people to work within the same files at once, as well as, share and upload remotely
• Establish a platform for communicating Teams, Slack, and Jabber are different resources teams use to chat in real-time and hold virtual meetings
  Have a project plan, ID outline, and/or requirements document for the team and client to reference
• Use an instructional design model like ADDIE or SAM and a project management model like waterfall or agile to manage the project
  Use a project management board platform like JIRA, Trello, or Teamwork to track progress towards deliverables and keep things on track