Agile methods in educational content creation
Since 2006, the Haremi team has managed thousands of print and digital learning content projects of different sizes and complexities. To successfully deliver on budget and schedule, we often use agile methods to meet the unique needs of each project. By adopting agile ways of working, we can create more impactful learning products for our customers.
Why Haremi takes an agile approach
Agile project management is a flexible way to manage projects that focuses on teamwork, ongoing feedback, and adaptable planning. Originally from software development, agile methods are great for projects where requirements can change over time. The key ideas are to break work into small manageable parts, foster collaboration between teams and stakeholders, and achieve regular progress milestones quickly.
At Haremi, adopting an agile approach has allowed us to streamline processes. Agile allows us to work on multiple components of an educational product at the same time and deliver content in regular batches for review. This helps us meet tight, market-driven deadlines.
Haremi's development processes for educational content often involve multiple stakeholders, including authors, subject matter experts, editors, and designers. We've found that using agile principles helps ensure everyone is aligned on project goals and improves communication and collaboration among these groups.
In traditional project management, updating content or incorporating feedback often isn't done until the project nears completion, which can be problematic. Agile methodologies tackle this issue by creating an environment where educational content can be continuously refined and optimised. This approach ensures that the content meets the needs of our customers and their learners, resulting in higher-quality learning resources overall.
Key features of agile project management in educational content creation
Iterative development
Agile project management emphasises delivering content in smaller, manageable segments. Often, when Haremi develops educational resources, we break down learning modules, courses or multimedia assets into focused components. We find that by handing over smaller iterations of the learning content on a regular basis over the duration of a typical project, our customers can review and feed back on the material early and often. This approach ensures that each component aligns with the product's learning objectives and engages stakeholders effectively before the entire project is completed.
Team collaboration
Many of our larger projects require the input of instructional designers, project managers, editors, authors and reviewers. An agile approach facilitates effective team collaboration by fostering regular communication and teamwork across different skill sets. We've employed agile practices like daily stand-ups, planning small batched deliveries (these are called 'sprints' in the technical world) and retrospectives to keep team members aligned on project goals. These aim to reducing misunderstandings and ensure everyone is aligned. We use collaborative tools like Smartsheet for project scheduling so all team members have access to up-to-date information and can provide feedback in real-time. Tools like Trello, Asana or monday.com can also be used to visualise tasks and workflows, making it easier to track progress and manage workloads.
Adaptive project planning
In traditional project management, the 'waterfall' approach often means content development planning is linear and inflexible. Agile methods, however, encourage adaptive planning, allowing project managers to adjust priorities and respond to changing requirements without derailing progress. At Haremi, our agile Project Managers excel at re-planning and re-prioritising to handle shifts in handover dates or deadlines, or unforeseen circumstances, ensuring we stay on track and deliver quality results.
Incremental delivery
We believe that an agile approach to incremental delivery aligns perfectly with the development of e-learning material, where content can be delivered in segments and refined over time. In particular, this allows us to produce early prototype versions of courses or modules, which can be used to gather data, collect feedback and improve subsequent iterations. Incremental delivery also allows for a 'minimum viable product' approach, which enables faster releases and earlier feedback from users, further enhancing the learner experience.
Retrospectives and reviews
Lessons learned reviews are an important part of agile methodologies, providing an opportunity for teams to reflect on what worked well, what needs improvement and how processes could be optimised. The Haremi team uses retrospective lessons learned meetings for this purpose, where team members are encouraged to learn from their experiences, reflect on the way they do things and challenge the status quo if they think something can be done differently or better. This has often led to improvements in the lead time for products and cost savings for our customers.
Wrapping up
Agile project management methodologies are helping Haremi's teams to develop, optimise and deliver print and digital learning contact projects of all sizes and types. By leveraging agile principles, we're able to produce educational resources that are flexible, responsive and grounded in user feedback. Whether it's developing small courses or complex multi-component programmes, our experience has been that agile project management offers the tools and framework needed to deliver high-quality learning materials on time and to budget.
To find out more about how our agile approach might benefit your content creation projects, send us an email or contact us.
