Project Management: Designing School Plans in Unprecedented Times
Project management is a vital discipline that orchestrates the efficient planning, organization, and execution of projects from start to finish. It entails defining project goals and objectives, allocating resources, managing timelines, and coordinating team members to ensure successful outcomes. Effective project management requires strong leadership, clear communication, and meticulous attention to detail. It entails identifying and mitigating risks, adjusting timelines and strategies as necessary, and fostering collaboration among team members. A skilled project manager employs various methodologies and tools to streamline processes, monitor progress, and maintain accountability. By implementing best practices and leveraging technology, project management maximizes efficiency and productivity, ultimately leading to the on-time and within-budget delivery of high-quality projects.Using a project management tool with your teams unites effort and provides critical guidance by creating specific actionable options, which teams own and that fit the needs of your school or district.
The formidable challenges school and district leaders face as they address critical problems are compounded when they lack a clear method for project management. Using a project management strategy enables collaborative planning and thoughtful design. Schools and districts armed with a collaborative problem-solving project management strategy can redesign essential processes effectively and are less likely to make serious missteps, thereby positioning a school or district to move forward more efficiently.
Savvy twenty-first century leaders will use a project management strategy for a variety of reasons. A project management strategy is designed to be inclusive, engaging, attentive to detail and focused on continuously improving results. Project management strategies like DMAIC, (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) provide a framework facilitating teams solving redesign, design and incremental improvement problems. DMAIC is a five phased strategy resembling PDSA, (Plan, Do, Study, Act), another project management strategy with which many educators are familiar. While both are commonly used in quality improvement work, we believe the added granularity of DMAIC makes it the best choice given the challenges we currently face.
School leaders today face enormous challenges. Meeting the diverse needs of students requires extraordinary faculty and staff effort in the best of times, let alone while conducting school in the midst of or following a global pandemic. Facing new health and safety concerns, schools and systems have been confounded by remote learning challenges, including access and equity, economic constraints, and the social unrest and pent up anxiety prevalent in our schools and school communities today.
A key to preparing for the new realities lies in thoughtful planning and reexamining core processes in the schoolhouse and district office.
The Challenge
How many times during the past year have you attended a conference or event and left thinking ‘we should do that too!’ Today talking heads (literally) and self-anointed new era-leaders are hosting virtual meetings daily. They offer their take on what should be done and how it should be done. Unfortunately, many real-world practicing leaders caught in the current urgency of crises without real direction from local, state and federal leaders follow the best advice they can get in the moment. All too often attempting to implement changes they were only briefly exposed to without fully considering the context of the change strategy - in their own situation. And while the “zoomed-up” approach may work in the presenter’s mind, school or district; without a coherent project management strategy and learned ownership, the adopted change is likely to fail.
Our most pressing challenges in education today and the redesign of important processes must take into account the new reality of schooling. School today is not solely a place, rather it has become a series of learning experiences which must be deliverable at any time and nearly anywhere.
A project management framework combined with an improvement science mindset; reduces the tendency to depend on “another shiny new program solution” and instead focuses on solutions based on close analysis of evidence to solve school and district problems.
Project Management in Action
When schools and districts moved abruptly to remote learning in March 2020, system participants faced disruptive change. The school experience changed for everyone – students, parents, teachers, administrators – and the legion of service providers and suppliers. Issues of access, equity, engagement, and commitment abounded.
Schools we have worked with have been striving to increase student access to technology which enabled learning and engagement for a long while – but the pressure to keep students connected and engaged in a fully remote learning environment has exacerbated and illuminated the challenge. With the reality of needing to deliver classes while connected with students remotely, has proven to be incredibly difficult even for the most readily prepared – and nearly impossible for those who had for whatever reason had lagged behind in the work.
At the end of the 2019-20 school year, access and engagement levels ranged from students who experienced incredible difficulty even connecting to learning to students who not only appreciated the remote nature of school but who thrived in the remote experience.
Setting aside access - one area schools have been problem solving is in how to structure virtual learning experiences which support all students with engaging instruction. We believe schools benefit from using a project management approach as they tackle problems arising from their real experience and in this case as they design options improving student engagement within the context of existing instruction.
Given this context; a school could define the problem they need their project management team to focus on - as the need to re-structure the current virtual learning offer in a manner which supports all students engaging in their learning, evidenced by at least 80% of students achieving at or above the proficiency level and so that all students demonstrate a year’s growth. This approach focuses on improving what is currently in place and moves the measure of success from process to student outcomes as evidence of engagement.
For this example, the principal serves as the project owner, meaning s/he will oversee the project and the project team can expect the principal’s support and guidance. The work begins with the principal or leadership team selecting a cross functional team, inclusive team which includes; regular classroom teachers, special program instructors, elective instructors, classroom assistants and or staff members, the technology specialist, parents and students.
The first step in the process, Define, depended upon the team members describing the issues students had engaging with the instruction when they began virtual learning and the evidence the school was able to collect about the extent students were engaged. In our demonstration site – the project management team found a number of process measures – they found evidence that tracked which students logging into and out of the learning platform. They uncovered summary data showing time in and time out for students who successful entered the LMS. Teachers had anecdotal records of students and parents with whom they had worked outside of class time using email and texts as examples. What was missing was evidence around proficiency achievement in comparison to previous years. Not only did the school lack evidence around end of the year assessments, it also was not able to conduct its own assessments which had been used to gauge student growth.
After the team organized and discussed the evidence they had collected, they discussed the project problem the principal and school leadership team.
With this framework of accumulated evidence and the defined problem, the team began to discuss additional measures which could be used to gauge student engagement and levels of proficiency.
From these discussions the team decided that in order to understand student engagement more fully they would have to look for and perhaps create new formal and informal assessments including asking for student perceptions of how effective the lessons were in appealing to their interests willingness to engage, The discussions lead the team to wonder about the degree of social and emotional engagement students felt for the work and determined that finding some metrics around the students social emotional health might shed light on other factors affecting student engagement.
As they analyzed the problem and the ways in which they would measure results, the team then considered how to best design learning experiences for students. They also needed to source methods to facilitate assessments for students to demonstrate achievement as they moved for process measures to student learning outcomes.
The goal of the project management team was to design an improvement plan to address the problem statement, which they could share with the principal and other staff prior to implementation.
Project Management Works
Tackling complex problems like increasing student engagement, creating blended delivery systems, and implementing district wide adaptive change requires collaboration. Understanding complex problems requires seeing the problem from a variety of vantage points. It requires leaders to assemble diverse and representative teams, honestly engaged in the work. It is the initial step in creating and fully assessing all options for delivering services differently in today’s environment.
Using the strengths, talents and effort of everyone is foundational to long term success. This critical first step sets the conditions for sustained continuous improvement.
When developing the team, it is not only important that the team is not limited by an overly simplistic definition of diversity based on gender, race, or ethnicity – the best solutions come from the most inclusive view of diversity. It’s fine to begin by creating a team that “looks” like your district but then expand the group to include cross-functional representation that may not be traditionally included from all key sectors of the district. Getting the necessary voices in the room together, not just those you normally hear from, is fundamental to this process.
STEP ONE: DEFINE
The first task is to define the problem which needs to be addressed. The goal is to develop change based on bottom-up solutions. With different problem parameters, a team looks deeply at the problem, questions begin to arise, challenges are discovered, and different considerations are laid bare. Sometimes quickly, sometimes more slowly a clear definition of the problem emerges. In this phase – while many of the problems of practice we are facing feel urgent – taking the time to honestly and deeply engage in understanding and defining the problem will not only allow the team to both move more expediently later in the process, but it will also lead to both greater ownership of the options and a more artful solution.
STEP TWO: MEASURE
By closely examining the problem statement, accurate measures can be determined that define the range of knowable information; along with what evidence is to be gathered to look at the scope of the possible project outcomes. When developing measures, it is critical to objectively take into account the existing discrepancies in levels of performance the current system produces.
STEP THREE: ANALYZE
The next phase of the team’s work analyzes existing practices and processes to see how they were delivered, what measures were used to determine success, and the underlying factors needing to be examined more carefully. Armed with this evidence and information, the team begins to outline and map the processes to be modified. Examining elements of the problem’s root causes helps to identify assumptions which will inform the team as it begins creating alternatives to the existing strategy or delivery model. At this point in the process the team may benefit from exploring other “best practices” and what they may offer in developing an alternative to the currently existing model(s).
STEP FOUR: IMPROVE
Moving to the improve phase allows the team to create options addressing the identified problem driving the need for change. Essentially, the team goal at step four is to create a design or redesign which addresses the problem identified and produce positive measurable results.
At this point, using options, pilots, or scenarios can be developed and put in place so that the team can study and learn from the implementation of the plan on a small scale. With one working improvement plan constructed from the options, measures are developed to assess the effectiveness of the implementation.
Measurable results need to be considered in a variety of forms so that equitable outcomes, such as, parent satisfaction, student learning, economic factors, and workload can be reviewed, considered, and reported.
STEP FIVE: CONTROL
With an implementation plan, the team is ready to try the new model with measures of its effectiveness. During and following implementation, the team assesses how well the modified processes worked. Given the information they collect, further improvements will likely need to be made. As the improved process replaces the former way the work was completed, communication about the changes help support broadening and deepening understanding of the change. As the implementation plan is enacted and refined, the process is in the control phase as the new practice or process replaces the prior work plan.
Having project teams plan for immediate improvements and other teams focused on anticipating future conditions will prepare schools and districts for what many see as our new normal. Through project management, teams build internal capacity for managing the unknown; they create resilience and strengths to innovate in the face of adversity. Armed with a problem-solving collaborative improvement project management strategy, teams can redesign essential processes that will position the district to move forward in unprecedented times.
Clayton Wilcox, Ed.D., has served as a Senior Vice President for Corporate and Government Relations at Scholastic Inc., and as a school superintendent and district leader for over 25 years in IA, LA, FL, MD, and NC. He now leads Thoughts2Lead, LLC which is focused on leadership, leadership development and helping business and industry better serve America’s schools.
Jerry Wilson, Ph.D, served as superintendent in five school districts in the past 25 years and now consults on school and district continuous improvement.
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