9 Teacher’s Tools for Class Planning and Delivery from the World of Project Management
Project Management has been my most useful takeaway from my years in corporate tech. It has allowed me to start a business without going insane. Surprisingly, it is also helping me with a more daunting task: teaching entrepreneurship to high school boys. I had to bring out the big guns.
In this post, I share the 9 tools I am using for planning this class and — I expect — delivering it (we’re still in the preparation stage). As examples, I share our project documents. You will find them in varied stages of completion, depending when you are reading this.
These tools are from the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), the richest source of codified Project Management wisdom. These 9 tools have been my favorites from my years of doing PM. And I always include these in the Project Management workshops I give to executives and student leaders.
If your teaching approach is more experiential learning than lectures, your work will be that of an orchestrator of learning experiences. If this is your case, I hope you will find these tools useful for that orchestration!
1. Project Charter
I have to thank Christopher Lo of iAdD for helping realize that I should use my PM tools for running this class. I asked for feedback on my plans and he responded with these questions:
What a great set of questions. I was already down in the weeds in preparing for the class. These questions helped me zoom out first, to guide my work with first principles.
“Hey,” I thought, “this process feels familiar…” Then the sudden realization. “O.M.G!” (as high school kids now say,) “this is the first step in PM — creating a project charter!”
I have this guide for crafting project charters that you might find useful:
Here is the project charter I made for this class:
The process of creating this project charter reminded me why each project should always start with one:
- It clarifies what we are trying to accomplish, thus guiding our selection of work to take on, focusing only those that lead to the goal (mainly learning objectives)
- For teaching teams, the charter ensures that everyone is in the same page, working toward the same set of goals
- For the institution, a charter is a filter to ensure that the projects that get worked on are those aligned to its mission and vision
- It sets the expectations on the work expected from people involved (see High Level Work Breakdown Structure section), the key risks, and the costs
(It also allows me to ask you this question, in case you have ran a Lean LaunchPad for high school students: Is this charter realistic?)
2. Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
When I studied for Project Management Professional (PMP) certification ten years ago, I felt that the Project Management Institute — the organization behind the certification — had a slight crush on the WBS. Throughout the years, I have also developed a fondness for the WBS. Here’s the one I made for this the delivery of this class:
Not much of a looker, I know. The WBS is just a glorified to do list, organized by categories and sub-categories. But once you start running projects with it, you will see its inner beauty:
- It is probably the best tool for scope management — ensuring that the work needed to complete the project, and only the work needed to complete the project, is identified, documented and done.
- Visual project control (I color completed items green; it’s nice to see the WBS become greener and greener as we progress).
- It allows quick cost and time estimates (just highlight costly or time-consuming items and add them up).
- It serves a basis in creating recruitment plans (how many and what kind of people you need), quality checklists, communications plan, and your risk breakdown structure (I discuss these three below).
- You need to at least not hate it to pass the PMP exam.
I use mindmaps if a project is new to me, like this class. I used Mindmup.com for this one. Freemind is another popular mindmapping software.
In my business, we normally use Trello or Asana for our WBS. These tools are better for collaborative work.
3. Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS)
The RBS is like the WBS, except the branches are risks instead of work.
This will be my first time to teach in high school. Having gone to an all boys school, I have this niggling sense of impending doom. I’m even more paranoid after producing this little bonsai in my first pass:
If you have taught in high school, or have ran a Lean LaunchPad, I’d really appreciate it if you could share the most common and the highest impact risks that you faced (please comment below or email me at sugbu@corazo.org).
4. Risk Register
After identifying your risks (which works best by asking people with experience), you could then score them in terms of likelihood and impact. You choose the rubric. I normally use this simple one:
- Impact: 3 is a show stopper. 1 can be neglected. 2 is in between.
- Likelihood: 3 is almost sure to happen. 1 is unlikely to happen. 2 is in between.
Mindmup has a nice feature called “Measures” (under View, Sidebar), which allows you to do this for each branch in the RBS.
You can then download all these measures and place them in a spreadsheet. Multiply Impact with Likelihood to get the Risk Score. With risk scoring, you can rank your risks. This allows you to focus your attention on the highest scoring risks.
Next, come up with risk mitigation tasks as well as contingencies. Tasks to mitigate risks (those that reduce their likelihood or their impact) should be included in the WBS. Likewise for tasks to prepare for contingencies (what you will do for risks that actualize). You’ll need good PM judgement to balance risk response and the additional work and cost they could entail.
If you place these risk scores and responses in a spreadsheet, you would have what is called a Risk Register. I will only do one for this class once I have inputs from experienced teachers, so here’s an example I got from Google:
For me, and for many project managers, the tendency is to focus on fire-fighting rather than risk reduction. One way to ensure that risks are managed is to include a review of the Risk Register in regular project meetings. The frequency should depend on risk scores. For instance, the highest scoring risks could be reviewed weekly, the next highest monthly, and the rest deliberately neglected.
5. Activity List (Syllabus)
It seems the syllabus is the closest thing to a project management tool in traditional class planning. It is a tool ideal for its purpose: to plan the delivery of content via lectures and reading assignments. For classes based on experiential learning, I imagine the syllabus could be upgraded, and it would end up looking like activity lists in the world of PM.
Below is the syllabus-like document I prepared when I ran a Lean LaunchPad 5 years ago for masters students:
I will update this based on what I learned from running that class, the Lean LaunchPad Educator’s Guide, and inputs from Lean LaunchPad teachers. I’ll post the updated version here.
6. Stakeholder Analysis and 7. Communications Management Plan
Project success = stakeholder satisfaction = expectation setting + delivering, both in fact and in perception.
Communication is also key to getting the work packages in the WBS done.
The first step in good project communication is to understand the relationship between each stakeholder and the project. My way of doing this stakeholder analysis is to fill out a table with the following columns:
- Stakeholder
- What they value in the output of the project
- What the project needs from them
Here’s my stakeholder analysis for this class:
The next step is to create a communications management plan. What I normally do is to extend the stakeholder analysis table with the following columns:
- Message
- Medium
- Timing
- Owner
Here’s the Communications Management Plan I created for this class:
These communications tasks are added to the WBS and (optionally) to the activity list. Yes, this is a lot of additional work. But overcommunication is the price of project success. “90% of the project manager’s work is communication,” as the oft-quoted adage goes.
8. Quality Checklists
In all my years of managing projects, I have not seen a tool that works better in ensuring quality than the simple checklist.
I have yet to create checklists for this class, but I have some old ones I could reuse. Here are some checklists I made when I had to organize mini-conference a few years back:
This demonstrates another advantage of using these standard PM tools. Not only can you reuse old collateral from similar projects; you can use collateral from similar project of other PMs (or teachers).
What I usually do is to create a checklist for each project teammate, and sit down with each of them and go through their checklists — during preparation, just before D-Day and on the day itself.
9. Project Management Plan
The Project Management Plan answers, “what’s your PM style for this project?” I answer this for each of the 10 project management knowledge areas:
- Project Integration Management
- Project Scope Management
- Project Time Management
- Project Cost Management
- Project Quality Management
- Project Human Resource Management
- Project Communications Management
- Project Risk Management
- Project Procurement Management
- Project Stakeholder Management
Here are some guide questions I use to help me think through this:
Here’s the Project Management Plan I created. This is actually the first document I worked on when I decided to use PM for this class.
Call to Action
Experiential learning requires a kind of management different from what teachers have traditionally used. The project management tools used for creating buildings, software and concerts may now be more appropriate for managing a class than the traditional syllabus.
Do you know of teachers who are running experiential learning classes like the Lean LaunchPad? It would be great if you could share this post to them, so that we can exchange experiences and figure this out together. These tools might also make a difference in their teaching.
If you know experienced high school teachers, could you please also share this with them? I’d love to hear their thoughts on this plan.
