🌱 7 project management best practices

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Welcome back to our series! We’re so glad you’re here. In today’s post, Atlassian Learning’s Shaun Prinster explores how learning experience design teams can strike the right balance between creativity and structure using industry-standard project management principles.

By: Shaun Prinster, Senior Learning Experience Designer

The scene: The Atlassian Learning team decided to redesign their training library to make it easier for designers to keep content up-to-date and easier for learners to participate. They decided to break up their existing training library into bite-sized pieces, taking courses that were often as long as eight hours and creating lessons that instead took no more than twenty minutes. So how did they turn 55 courses, equalling 165 hours of learning content, into almost 300 lessons that clock in at just 46 hours without losing anything important?

Well, it took over a year, and project management best practices guided them every step of the way.

Support + resources = top-notch learning experiences on schedule and within budget

Producing meaningful training requires a creative, innovative team with a deep understanding of how people learn. But even the most talented teams need a plan. On our team, we use project management principles aligned with the Project Management Institute (PMI) to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and mitigate risks—all while staying focused on the learner experience.

We use the following seven PMI principles for our projects:

1. Define project scope and objectives

Set specific learning objectives, identify the target audience, and outline the deliverables. A well-defined scope helps prevent uncontrolled expansion (scope creep) and ensures all team members and stakeholders are aligned with the project goals from start to finish.

2. Establish timelines

Develop a detailed project timeline with milestones, so your team can monitor progress and make adjustments. Tools like Gantt charts represent each project task and identify dependencies, allowing team members to visualize the timeline and avoid costly delays. Communicating progress and comparing it to original estimates can keep the team on track throughout the project.

3. Manage budget and resources

Track costs throughout the project to prevent overspending and demonstrate a return on investment. The budget for a learning experience design team might include expenses for software licenses, new technology, or visual assets from external sources. Resources a learning experience design team might need to manage could include allocating personnel, software, and equipment to support the project goals.

4. Perform quality assurance and continuously improve

Ensure visual and written training content meets your team’s standards and is clear, accurate, and aligned with your organization’s voice. Regular user testing with learners and implementing their feedback can help refine the content as it’s designed and developed. Once a learning project is complete, evaluating the project’s outcomes and applying lessons learned helps the team improve processes and products for next time.

5. Mitigate risk

Keep an eye out for potential risks throughout the project so your team can create workarounds and stay on track. Anticipating challenges like resource shortages, technical issues, or changes in stakeholder requirements keeps the team prepared to address challenges when they happen.

6. Engage with stakeholders

Communicate with stakeholders throughout the project to gather feedback, manage expectations, and ensure alignment with project goals. Holding kickoff meetings to set expectations and maintaining open lines of communication helps build trust and facilitates collaboration between the team and stakeholders. Collecting feedback from stakeholders also helps promote trust and continuous improvement.

7. Facilitate leadership and team collaboration

Steer learning experience design projects toward success with strong leadership and effective team collaboration. Project leaders can be people managers or individual contributors. Either way, they should foster a collaborative atmosphere, encourage innovation, and offer clear guidance to team members. Empowering the team to take ownership of their tasks and share new ideas can improve the overall project outcome.

Project management principles in action

Let’s walk through how our team applied the above principles to our recent training library redesign.

Ellen, a Senior Learning Experience Designer on the LCD team and a spreadsheet maven, was the project manager.

• First, Ellen defined the project scope by creating an inventory of our existing courses.

• Next, she created Jira work items for each course needing a review and rework, which allowed our team to manage the resources we would need to complete the project.

• Then, she established timelines and kept our team on track by monitoring progress through Jira and Jira Product Discovery.

• Throughout the project, we continuously improved templates and processes so we could work more quickly and improve what we were producing. Confluence came in handy when we needed to visualize and socialize our designs for reworked content.

• As we completed lessons, other team members performed quality assurance using checklists to ensure accurate content and visuals aligned with the Atlassian brand.

• The project involved risks because redesigning our training library meant moving all of our lessons, courses, and learning paths to a new platform with new technology. When our development team signaled they might not be able to complete all functionality by our launch date, we mitigated the risk of a late rollout by prioritizing our feature requests. We identified “must-have” functionality for the initial launch and “nice-to-have” features we could add later.

• To keep stakeholders informed and engaged, we shared updates asynchronously using Jira dashboards and internal communication channels. Our dev team shared progress updates with Loom to accommodate schedules and time zones and minimize meetings.

• Throughout the project, the Community & Learning leadership teams provided resources and offered guidance while also trusting our team to get our work done and surface needs or concerns as they came up.

• Our team collaborated in regular meetings to discuss progress and share best practices. For example, the team tasked with updating the product demo videos met regularly to align on design standards and share best practices to speed the development and quality of the demo videos.

Wondering how your team might apply project management principles?

Check out Atlassian’s complete guide to project management.

If you have questions for our team about how we use project management principles, we’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Keep an eye out for more "Behind the scenes with Atlassian Learning" posts. 🌱 

Read the whole series

[Becky Mueller]

This was a big project, but it went smoothly due to all these awesome project management skills!! Thank you Ellen and Shaun!

[Kit Mitchell]

This is a great breakdown. Thank you for sharing :) 

[Andy Gladstone]

Really enjoying this series in general, but this article in particular. There are a lot of lessons that the community can learn from these experiences, thank you for sharing them @Julia Eddington!