Projects and Squiggles

When we talk about processes, there’s a balance between traditional Project™ “waterfall” approaches - dependencies, critical paths, charters, etc. and what happens in practice - rapid prototypes, DIY experimentation, communities and networks, and emergent designs to support practice.

compared with

There’s a place for both, but tension arises because people (I think) tend to think more like Damien Newman’s Squiggle¹, but Project Managers™ think in Gantt charts. They aren’t always easily compatible.

The work I do straddles both worlds - campus-wide platforms require an approach that attempts to ensure reliability of service and protection of data. And the innovation that happens around the edges of a university is much more squiggly. We get to try to translate between the two approaches in order to serve the needs of the community.

Projects™ are hard - how do you really respond to changing needs, new ideas, prototypes, false starts, and failures?

Squiggles are hard - how do you estimate how much to budget for something like that? How many people are involved? What’s the sustainability model? Who supports Squiggly things?

It’s not one or the other approach. They need to fit together somehow - and that’s a challenge because the languages and concepts and responsibilities are so dramatically different.

This becomes even more challenging when faced with a funding crisis and the loss of the IT Partner role on campus - which was designed specifically to help bridge the worlds of Projects™ and Squiggles.

See Also

• Notes: Wermeskerken et al. Effects of Instructor Presence in Video Modelling Examples on Attention and Learning
• Design thinking, with giant lobsters
• performance/class/session process
• Redesigning the UCalgary D2L homepage
• Notes: Chin et al. (1988). Development of an instrument measuring user satisfaction of the human-computer interface