Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design

This week, my  task has been to allocate the resources and estimate the costs associated with an ID project. Fortunately, many resources exist to help with these estimates for project managers as they begin to manage ID projects, and the ID community is always eager to help fellow Instructional Designers, if you know where to look.  Here are three resources that would be useful in estimating the costs, effort, and/or activity durations associated with ID projects. 

At Don Clark's "Big Dog & Little Dog's  Performance Juxtaposition" website http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html,  instructional designers and ID project managers

The Art of Communication

In the Walden University multimedia program “The Art of Effective Communication”, the message scenario for Mark’s missing report was delivered in three distinct ways.  Here we discuss how you communicate with different project stakeholders is equally important but can have distinct differences in the way messages are interpreted.  Below we discuss the difference in one message delivered in three ways.

Face to Face

The first of the communication methods we will discuss is that of the face to face discussion.  Jane seems almost apologetic in the beginning of her request of the missing report

Learning from a Project “ Post-mortem”

In a previous project management endeavor writing a large multi-million dollar federal grant which involved all the departments of the organization, it was important to follow the project management process.  I began with reading the terms of the grant to establish the intent and scope of the project.  I then had to design and present a proposal to convince the leadership team this was a worthwhile endeavor as it would require resources from all departments both in the grant proposal and the resultant grant fulfillment if the grant was awarded.  The proposal as also a way to sell the project internally to all departments and to attain a project sponsor who could work around roadblocks or uncooperative department employees. 

The grant writing group consisted of three to five participants (three constant and two as needed) with myself as the lead.  The writing