Project Management for Instructional Designers: A Multi-Institutional Collaborative

Building the field’s shared vocabulary, templates, and mentorship pathways for ID project leadership.

Context

Instructional designers are increasingly asked to lead complex, multi-stakeholder projects — course redesigns, program launches, AI integrations, accessibility overhauls — that look and behave like portfolio-scale work.

But the field has historically prepared IDs as practitioners, not as project leaders. The toolkit of formal project management (intake processes, scope contracts, RACI charts, stakeholder mapping, risk registers) often arrives through trial-and-error, after the first few projects have already strained or stalled.

The result, across institutions, is a familiar pattern: talented designers absorbing scope creep, missed handoffs, and unclear ownership as personal failings rather than predictable consequences of missing scaffolding. This is a career-sustainability problem as much as it is a project-delivery problem.

Challenge

The work was to build a shared vocabulary, a reusable set of templates, and a mentorship pathway for project management practice in instructional design — across institutions rather than within one — and to do it through the networks the field already trusts.

Three constraints shaped the design:

• Cross-institutional, not local. Templates and language had to be portable across organizational cultures, team sizes, and reporting structures.
• Practitioner-grounded. Examples had to come from real ID projects, not from generic PMO frameworks transplanted from corporate IT.
• Sustained, not one-off. A single conference talk would not change practice; the work needed to live in mentorship, webinars, podcasts, and repeated venues over time.

Approach

I convened and co-led a multi-institutional collaborative on project management for instructional designers, threading the work through the field’s most-used national networks: the Online Learning Consortium, EDUCAUSE in partnership with Penn State’s ID2ID peer mentoring program, and the POD Network.

The strategy was to meet IDs where they already gathered:

• Panels at OLC Accelerate and Innovate. Practitioner-led conversations on scope, intake, stakeholder management, and the politics of project leadership within ID teams.
• OLC Featured Webinar. A standalone session translating the panel content into a structured, reusable format with templates.
• HigherID Podcast, Episode 13. An extended conversation that became the most-listened episode of its season — evidence the topic resonates beyond a niche audience.
• EDUCAUSE / Penn State ID2ID. Participation in the peer mentoring program, followed by ongoing service on the Advisory Committee shaping the next iteration.
• Open-shared templates. Intake checklists, RACI examples, and stakeholder-mapping artifacts made available so the work transfers, not just travels.

Outcomes

The collaborative’s reach across the field is documented through multiple national venues and ongoing service roles:

Beyond the reach numbers, the underlying outcome has been cultural: project management vocabulary — “scope,” “intake,” “RACI,” “stakeholder map” — has become more naturally available to mid-career IDs who previously had only personal workarounds.

Several have written to say the language gave them new ground to stand on in difficult institutional conversations.

My role

As convener, co-facilitator, and lead author across these venues, I shaped the conceptual frame (project management as a sustainability practice, not a control practice), drafted and refined the shared artifacts, recruited co-presenters across institutions, and now serve on the EDUCAUSE / Penn State ID2ID Advisory Committee.

The work integrates instructional design, project management, and faculty/staff development — and is informed by more than a decade of leading ID projects at the program scale.

What I learned, and what’s next

Two insights have stayed with me.

First, the templates matter less than the permission they grant: when a mid-career ID has a shared artifact to point to, they can renegotiate scope without it sounding personal.

Second, the most useful project management content for IDs is rarely about tools — it is about how to make invisible work visible to leaders who do not yet see it.

Next: a publication that pulls the multi-year work into a single reference, expansion of the templates into a structured open toolkit, and a renewed focus on project management as a frame for responsibly integrating generative AI into ID workflows.

Selected artifacts

• Podcast: Project Management for Instructional Designers — HigherID Podcast, Episode 13 (most-listened episode of its season).
• Webinar: Project Management Practices for Instructional Designers — Online Learning Consortium Webinar Series.
• Conference panels: OLC Accelerate and OLC Innovate — multi-year panel series on project leadership for ID teams.
• Service role: Advisory Committee, EDUCAUSE / Penn State ID2ID peer mentoring program.
• Open templates: Intake checklists, RACI examples, and stakeholder-mapping artifacts shared with the ID community.
• Related projects on this site: ID2ID Peer Mentoring · Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Collective · Pedagogical Wellness CoP