Please take a moment to review our module description, outcomes, and purpose. Consider: What are you hoping to learn, and what do you want to implement into your teaching?
There are a number of project management tools, processes, and strategies. In this module, orient yourself to one process in particular — design thinking — and a strategy for implementing the “empathy” stage of the process. You will close out the experience by reflecting on learning and committing to the next step for your practice.
Now, on a sheet of paper or in your journal, write a question you hope to have answered by the end of the course based on our outcomes. Consider what would shift for you if you've answered this question.
Make sure you can find this question later and actively reflect on it throughout the module.
The project management video awaits. See you there!
This vignette shows the design thinking process in action, highlighting what happens at each stage. Again, the stages are empathy, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
Read the example and then:
End Products:
Students brainstorm a list of various stakeholders that are connected to the concept of running and operating a restaurant. Here is their list—restaurant manager, chef, investor, restaurant owner, servers, patrons of various age-groups and income brackets. Student teams take different stakeholder groups to complete the empathy maps. In addition to what the stakeholder sees, feels, thinks, and does, the map includes the stakeholders’ goals or vision for a successful restaurant.
Some teams are able to complete interviews (restaurant manager; patrons of different age-groups and income brackets; servers) while others complete the empathy maps through research and other available data (investor; chef/kitchen staff).
Teams share key takeaways from the empathy maps in a carousel. They look for (a.) patterns or trends, (b.) opposing interests or needs, and (c.) evidence of different concepts (power, systems, wellness, and/or equity). Students use their observations to write a problem statement for each stakeholder group.
Teams move on to generating ideas for a restaurant that attends to the stakeholder problem statements. They use this guiding question: How can I bridge the needs and wants of the stakeholders?
Teams develop an outline for key sections of a business proposal.
Teams present their ideas for feedback to the following groups: peers and interviewed stakeholders. They then take the revisions and return to the ideate stage for revisions and new ideation as needed.
Ahhh. We are in the final moments of the Project Management module. Let’s reflect! Consider the three whys below.
Ask yourself these three "whys" about project management, and specifically design thinking.
Why does this process
matter to me?
Why does this process
matter to my students?
Why does it matter for people
outside of the classroom?
We have put together a list of additional resources to help you continue to deepen your project management learning journey.
At the beginning of this module, we introduced the module description, outcomes, and purpose and asked you to write a question that you hoped would be answered. While reviewing our outcomes and purpose, refer back to that question to answer the following prompt below:
Woo hoo! Happy dance time. When you are done, try out your action step. Happy HQPBL’ing!