Finishing
In my career, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a couple of large-scale projects come to fruition and finish. There’s always hoopla and hype at the beginning that fades pretty quickly once the work begins. But when the project lasts a couple of years, the end is, at best, anticlimactic. Most of the enthusiasm is gone by then. Instead, what gets you to the end is momentum and the ability to work as a team to get you through to the finale. And once you’re there? Not much.
My experience working in large organisations is that despite spending large amounts of money getting a project up and running, they forget the project ends. They fail to celebrate the effort taken to complete the project and that there was a real and tangible outcome to all of that work.
My team and I have come to the end of a three-year project. There are a few thousand hours worth of work wrapped up in what we’ve done, which is to put two full degree programs up online to run in the Open Universities Australia (OUA) marketplace. Each individual course has been designed and developed to be run entirely asynchronously without the need to attend any classes (they are optional), so a lot of content and activities have been created for these courses. They’re incredibly robust, well-designed, and professional. There are so many intricacies in each one of the courses that there are hundreds of examples of good practice, learning design and content authoring.
Knowing how the institution responds to a project drawing to an end, it was really up to us to celebrate what we achieved. The recognition for what we’ve done wasn’t going to come from the organisation, so we needed to celebrate our own efforts. One of the things that I’ve been trying to develop personally is thinking beyond the job and focusing on my career. That means that at the end of this project, the job is technically done, but from a career perspective, we need to make sure that we can reference our work in the future and demonstrate what we did during the project. The team is currently working on this, bringing together a portfolio site that will contain information about all the courses we worked on, with screenshots and case studies covering what we've produced.
The other part of this that we have been able to finish is recording what we've done, utilising the skills across the team to develop three videos. The aim was to try and capture some key elements:
- The project overall & innovations behind the scenes
- The design process we developed
- Our reflections on the curriculum design process
I've never made a wrap-up video like this, and I am proud of the result, even though this had little to do with me and was all my team. I actually don't mind being on camera!
The team have now moved on to other work - we are all immersed in developing courses for the "new" university, and the courses will continue to run, but our work developing them is all done and dusted. While we start this project the aim is to pull together our portfolio site when we have time and space.
Trying to capture 3 years of work is a challenge. The videos don't necessarily tell the story of the experience, they allude to it and the challenges we faced, but they don't tell it. They don't cover the trials and failures we encountered, the lessons learnt and applied, the evolving nature of the work and the different approaches we took. The "agile" approach we took that prioritised iteration over perfection, which challenged everyone on the team as nothing was ever done until now, when it is well and truly done. They also don't capture the relationships and how every individual involved grew and changed and adapted to face whatever was coming. At the end of the day it was a human scale effort, that required us to keep that constraint in mind even when the spreadsheets said otherwise. We developed a new design tool, created a best practice approach to course design and development, and all of us came out with new skills and experiences to draw on. I really have loved bringing this team together and managing the project through from it's rocky start through to today.