Darrin Quesenberry

"Project management involves planning, monitoring, and controlling instructional design and development projects" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 50). Project managers negotiate, budget, install information monitoring systems, and evaluate progress and improvement.

"Management involves controlling Instructional Technology through planning, organizing, coordinating, and supervising" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 49). I define management as active involvement in every step of the process. An instructional technologist must plan, organize, and oversee the entire process.The domain of management includes four subdomains: Project Management, Resource Management, Delivery System Management, and Information Management. 

 

Reflection

The ITMA program has made me a lot more confident in my management skills. I have been in a management role for many instructional technology projects prior to starting the program. I have always been comfortable in that role. With my new knowledge and skills I feel that I can plan, organize, coordinate, and supervise with more efficiency and confidence. When I first started out, I didn’t manage a lot of people. I was mostly a one man team doing all the design and development. I was also the SME. In my current role, I am not the SME most of the time. It is my responsibility to guide the project and help the SME develop the instruction in a way that can be transferred to the learners. 

 

I am just finishing up a major effort in implementing a new learning environment for my company. This involved a lot of project management in order to meet the deadlines that were set. Another task that I am starting at work, thanks to the knowledge I gained from this program is knowledge harvesting. I am managing the effort to capture critical knowledge from employees. A major problem for many organizations is knowledge loss. This happens when employees leave a company (voluntarily, lay-offs, retirement etc.) and the critical knowledge that they have isn’t documented, therefore the knowledge leaves with them. This leaves those employees co-workers and successors trying to “figure-out” what they did as a part of that job.  I am leading the effort in forming a process of documenting these jobs and the associated tasks through the use of prompting questions to obtain the tacit knowledge from incumbent employees. I know I have a better understanding of how to manage my time and other resources because of the skills I have learned in this program.

 

In the future, I plan to be a more effective and efficient manager. I want to use my new knowledge and experience to be a more confident leader.