[Photo by Laura Olsen on Unsplash]
I have come across Agile Project Management through my encounter with the Digital Humanities projects and was fascinated by its flexibility, openness, and iterative approach to managing projects, specifically within the digital environments. According to Agile Alliance, agile is defined as “the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way of dealing with, and ultimately succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent environment” (“Agile 101”, n.d. para 1). In this blog post, I would like to reflect on the benefits of Agile Project Management practices for digital learning environments and specifically for the research project, I am currently leading.
One of the distinct characteristics of Agile project management is a lack of “rigidly defined plan of action” (Krehbiel et al., 2017, p. 90), and working in cycles or iterations with frequent feedback and check-ins. When applied to the educational settings, the Agile learning environment can be described as “student-centred, self-authored and collaborative” (Krehbiel et al., 2017, p. 91). In their Agile Manifesto for Teaching and Learning, Krehbiel and his coauthors (2017) have prioritized adaptability, collaboration, student-driven inquiry, continuous improvement as some of the elements that can help learning environments to be more agile. When applying these elements to my projects, I have been able to overcome some barriers and achieve the desired outcomes.
One of the recent projects that I am managing is an RDM [Research Data Management] initiative on my campus. The two outcomes of this project are (1) creating a toolkit with the RDM best practices in small academic libraries; (2) creation of the event on campus to raise awareness about new RDM requirements in light of tri-agency new policy on DM plans for funding application among Faculty and graduate students. In this project, I am working with a small team of one professor, RA, and an external consultant. I have a lead in this project and working closely with a RA to supervise tasks and oversee the overall planning of the project.
Some of the challenges in this project are working fully in the virtual environment due to the COVID-19 situation, which has somewhat changed the communication dynamics between the team members as well as created some new challenges about communicating with the higher administration and other stakeholders and creating planning committee due to more pressing issues on their plate. Furthermore, another challenge is aligning the project plan and budget considerations with the new circumstances that might not allow for the planning of an actual event on campus, therefore, mitigating risks will be something that the team will need to consider (Watt, 2014).
I have applied Agile principles in this project, specifically with respect to the challenges, since we had to adapt to new circumstances and requirements. According to Agile principles, Agile teams are self-organizing, while the project manager takes the role of a facilitator/coach (Krehbiel et al., 2017). While this has been a barrier in a related project in the past due to the lack of well-defined leadership, I have adopted an approach of “learning together” in the current project iteration, which allows all the members of the team to contribute to the conversation and share their input. Another helpful practice was the adoption of the virtual “stand-ups” – a practice where the team can express what works and what does not, as well as what needs improvement. This creates a strong team-building and modells openness and trust within the team.
Finally, this experience has been helpful for me to test my role as a project manager and cultivate agility in my work, adopting an Agile mindset, which “provides the ability to focus on adaptability and continuous improvement through collaboration with others” (Krehbiel et al., 2017, p. 108).
References:
Agile 1o1 (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/
Krehbiel, T., Salzaruloa, P., Cosmaha, M., Forrena, J., Gannodb, G., Havelka D., Hulshult A., & Merhouta, J. (2017) Agile Manifesto for Teaching and Learning. The Journal of Effective Teaching. 17 (2), 90–111. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1157450.pdf
Watt, A. (2014). Project Management. Victoria, BC: BCcampus.Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/projectmanagement/