Design Thinking: The Implementation Stage

Co-authored with Joann Kozyrev

Implementation is when the fun really begins. Now it is time to take our plans, our ideas, and our concepts and put them to the test. Each of the stages up until now provides us with the tools to create the implementation plan:

• Discovery defines the opportunity
• Reframing/Imagining encourages a broad look at creative ideas
• Conceptualizing unites the best of these ideas around an actionable plan based on shared design principles.
• Implementation puts that plan into action!

The actual plan will vary depending on the kind of project you are undertaking--but remember, for us, Implementation usually takes 60-70% of the time and effort. The steps, team members, roles, and responsibilities are very different for a project to investigate and adopt or build a technology solution than they are for developing a course. Likewise, the implementation plan will be different for creating a new student success program than for designing and launching a new degree program. Because of these differences, this short article can’t tell you how to create and carry out your specific implementation plan. Instead, we’ll review some elements of the plan which are sometimes overlooked, and consider a project to design and development of a hypothetical mathematics course for non-majors as an example.

Define the project objectives

Educators are well aware of the importance of setting objectives for a learning experience, but sometimes we forget to articulate the objectives for our projects. Stating the tangible, measurable products that your project will produce helps you to maintain focus and control scope creep.

Example: For our math course project, the objectives could be to develop a fully online course that:

• increases student success by providing rich opportunities for practice and recommended remediation pathways to help students who have forgotten what they have learned in prior math courses
• combats math anxiety through both social learning and short, clever animated help videos
• emphasizes practical application through end-of-module mini projects applying the math concepts to business and personal finance.

Gather the Team

It is important to make sure that you have the right members of the team and that their roles are clear. Remember that some (or all) members of the team may be volunteers, but their involvement still needs to be planned and managed. You may also have core team members as well as some team members who are just approvers or reviewer. You may want to consider making a RACI chart to identify who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed on the project. For a complex project, different deliverables may have different assignments of roles.

Example: The Responsible person on our math courses project is an instructional designer. The professor working on the design is Accountable, and selected faculty in the department will be Consulted at various points in the process. The department chair will be Informed as milestones are met. (She may wish to be changed to Consulted during the first prototype stage.)

Schedule and Milestones

Sometimes innovative education projects are like old cowboys. They don’t so much fail as just fade away. When projects start with a lot of enthusiasm, it is important to keep that momentum going. Setting a schedule, planning milestones and celebrating each as they are reached can help save your project from suffering from back-burneritis.

Example: Our schedule allows for a lot of prototyping. We’ll prototype the following elements of our course in the first month of the project: a typical module and the integration of our content with our LMS, and a typical mini project. We’ll also storyboard out a sample animation. In the second month, we’ll review and revise all of these, then we’ll build out the first half of the course, and review again. In the third month, we’ll complete the second half of the course. In the last month, we’ll test and troubleshoot and get ready to teach!

Articulate a Communication Plan

Think through who your stakeholders are and how often they will expect to hear from you and build routine communication such as updates, sharing of deliverables and milestones, as well as invitations to participate and put these events on your calendar so that they don’t get overlooked.! The more people are informed about progress, the more they are likely to be ready and able to help you if a problem must be solved. And for that matter, use the RACI chart that you made to help you determine what your escalation path is when you inevitably run into a problem or unexpected turn of events.

Example: We plan to spend about 16 weeks developing our math course and we’ve made an extremely robust communication plan, so you can see lots of possible elements. We have three meetings with the whole team planned, and weekly meetings between the faculty designer and instructional designer. We will use our RACI chart to escalate any problems we run into with, say, acquiring materials or getting our technology tools to work well. We also plan a monthly update across the department and have three review stages where we will ask students and other faculty to review our work.

Define Success before you Begin

One of Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is to begin with the end in mind. The same can be said of highly effective projects. Knowing what will make you say: This project is a winner means you will build the project to collect the data--and it will help you make decisions as you go. (it will also set you up for the next phase of the project, which is evolution!)

Example: Success for our math class is defined as:

• a 20% decrease in the drop/withdraw/fail rate in the course
• a mean rating of 4 of the course value on the student feedback questionnaire (up from the typical 2.9 for the current version).
• 70% of faculty will express willingness to teach the online version of the course
• enrollments in the course will increase 40%, allowing for the hiring of a TA so that more students can be served without overburdening faculty workloads

Review and Refine your Budget

If you have been following this process, you established at least a high-level budget during the conceptualization phase. Now is a good time to review all of your resources--human, physical, monetary, and time. If there is a deficit in any of these areas, you can look for reinforcements--or adjust your objectives. And remember--you are thinking long term, so if you have to, return to your MVP, your minimum viable product, and plan to achieve more objectives as the project evolves.

Example: Our instructional designer has been given 150 hours to work on the project, and our faculty member has received release time from teaching one course and secured a small grant to pay for the creation of the animations. The department plans to recoup some of these costs through increased student persistence and enrollments. Originally, we had hoped to also create the mini projects, but we have decided to use offerings from a publisher for the first iteration of the course, and develop our own mini-projects when the course is revised.

Be Honest about the Risks

You believe in this project. You’ve done a lot of planning and gotten a lot of buy-in. You are just about to begin, and you want to believe that nothing can go wrong. But being honest about the risks to the objectives, the schedule, the budget, and the success of the project will make you more agile when dealing with whatever unexpected events occur.

Example: The biggest risks with course design and development usually have to do with competing demands for faculty time. What will you do if the faculty designer can’t meet his deadlines because of other opportunities or reassignment? Can anyone else pitch in? Are there other materials that can be substituted for his work? Changes in publisher’s offerings, budget overruns, disagreement about scope and vision, and changes in government or institutional policy are all common risks which you might encounter.

Much like this article, implementation is often the longest phase in the project and usually requires the most stamina to get through. But once you have made it, the rewards are great. You are now ready to launch! And, if you are have played your cards right, made great decisions, worked well with your team and had just the right amount of good luck, your project will be a resounding success. That means you get to...plan for its long term health and well being through its evolution and iteration phase! And...if you share your success and others hear about it, you’ll likely get to do it all over again in a new context or in a bigger way.