Succeeding with the Instructional Design Specialty

Joe Wynne is a versatile Project Manager experienced in delivering medium-scope projects in large organizations that improve workforce performance and business processes. He has a proven track record of delivering effective, technology-savvy solutions in a variety of industries and a unique combination of strengths in both process management and workforce management.

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When you are a project manager, it is best to remain flexible. You never know when you may have to adjust the specifics of how you manage the project. One area where this is experienced is with certain specialties that have developed their own project processes over decades; these will expect you to respect those processes. If you can work with these specialties, then you are a more valuable project manager.

One such specialty is instructional design. Without knowledge of how these teams prefer to work, you may make the blunder of starting your interaction with them assuming that you can break up work into groupings that have served you in the past, such as planning. You may even use a grouping named delivery, because it is obvious. (Training is delivered, isn't it?)

Instructional design teams don’t really use those terms. These are the phases of their projects: 

• Analyze: This is where instructional designers scope out the work and obtain content to be used in training. The objectives of the training will be defined here; that will be a deliverable you want to track.
• Design: Instructional designers in this phase figure out the best methods of imparting the content to learners. Testing is also typically designed here because knowing the endpoint allows the specialists to better design the content of the …

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