Blog Assignment: Learning from a Project “Post-mortem”
The project I chose was basically a school project that I took and used as a project to train some of the leaders in a church I currently am a member. Some of these leaders knew of the procedures and some did not. This project was based on "How to Conduct an Effective Business Meeting". Most churches use parliamentary procedure to conduct their business meetings and also this is how an organization is structured. Therefore conducting an effective business meeting would work both in a church as well as in a business. However, because churches are non-profit organizations, they do not run like businesses so this project was not completely business oriented even though some churches do have a hierarchical structure which run like businesses, this project did not follow this pattern. This project was more like a teaching and learning project. Therefore this post-mortem analysis would not allow for stakeholders or funding offices and so on. In this case however, my stakeholder was the pastor of the church and his representatives.
In my post-mortem analysis, some of which I gathered from the assessment that I gave in the form of pre-test and post-test and some are from my own evaluation, I found that
1. Negatively speaking, some of the persons did not like the fact that I did the Pre-Test Post-Test as one test. The point made was that the Pre-test should have been done before and the Post Test afterwards. This was a good suggestion as a Pretest not only test persons’ prior knowledge of the content but could also be used as a way to gather information on the type of learners I am dealing with.
2. From my own personal observation, more artifacts could have been submitted in different forms like animation, text design and other graphical designs should have been used to make the learning more interesting.
3. If I had a magic wand and would change anything, I would have set up the project to include all leaders in the church as this would have given them the background knowledge they needed to conduct a business meeting.
What contributed to the project’s success was the motivation of the learners as they were all adults, most were highly trained educationally and some had background knowledge of the topic. From th Post-Test, why it failed was that all of the post test questions were not answered correctly even though most questions were answered correctly. This showed that more training could have been done.
The part of the Post Mortem process if it was included that would have made the project to become more successful was the part with the artifacts. Most likely if more artifacts or learning objects were included in the project, then all the questions would have been answered correctly as more visual methods which help learners to learn would have been used.
References
http://www.experiment-resources.com/pretest-posttest-designs.html
Greer, M. (2010). The Project Management Minimalist: Just Enough PM to Rock Your Projects. http://michaelgreer.biz
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Hi Ruth,
ReplyDeleteYou're right about churches using Robert's Rules of Parliament to conduct meetings. Most of the church meetings that I have attended have been so very well conducted that business meetings pale in comparison! Your learning project seems very daunting to me...I would have been shaking in my shoes if I had to conduct a training session that my pastor attended...so kudos to you!
Now that we have the benefit of acquired knowledge of project management tools, do you believe a tool such as the Work Breakdown Schedule would have made your project even more successful? I am wondering if that tool would have provided a means to capture all the tasks and deliverables, including the learning objects you mentioned...
Hi Ruth,
ReplyDeleteIt sounds as if you did a good job evaluating the parts of the project that went right and those that didn't quite go as planned. However, I don't think you have given yourself enough credit for as many things that went right on your project. There are many facets to a project plan and the deliverable, although certainly very important, is just one piece of the big pie.
There are some other aspects of the project that evidently went as planned; at the very least you had to identify and invite the target audience, secure any funding that may have been necessary, schedule a meeting room and deliver the training within the time frame outlined on the project plan. It is easy, as an instructional designer, to perhaps beat ourselves up over the one piece of the project that we pride ourselves on but in reading your description above, it seems so much more went right than not.
One of the attributes Murphy lists for a successful project manager is "plan, reiterate, organize, understand, communicate and evaluate" (1994, p. 2). It sounds as if you possess this trait because although there were certain changes you would have made to the education materials, overall it sounds as if the project was a success.
Reference:
Murphy, C. (1994). Utilizing project management techniques in the design of instructional materials. Performance & Instruction, 33(3), 9–11. Copyright by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Used by permission via the Copyright Clearance Center