Agile for Instructional Designers
Discover Agile for Better Instructional Design
To serve business needs amid greater volatility and uncertainty in the workplace, learning and development professionals need project management methods that can keep up. Enter Agile.
Popular in the software development space as an approach to project management, when applied to instructional design, Agile provides a framework for adapting to change as it happens and for delivering the content most needed by learners. Agile for Instructional Designers proposes using Agile methodology to manage training projects and highlights where traditional linear processes have failed the business and the end users.
Recognizing that software development and instructional design have different needs and outcomes, author Megan Torrance developed the LLAMA methodology. Her approach adapts the common phases of ADDIE to incorporate the incremental, iterative nature of Agile projects. It allows learners to test and evaluate which features or design functions work before they’re finalized. It also offers a way to accommodate inevitable mid-project modifications pushed by stakeholders, subject matter experts, or organizational leaders.
With templates for goal alignment, learner personas, scope definition, estimating, planning, and iterative development, Agile for Instructional Designers is the resource you need to embrace change in learning and development.
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![Megan Torrance]()
Full ProfileMegan Torrance is the chief energy officer of TorranceLearning, an e-learning design and development firm outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. She has spent over two decades knee-deep in projects involving change management, instructional design, consulting, and systems deployment. Megan thrives on design excellence and elegant project management. And coffee. She and the TorranceLearning team have developed the LLAMA project management approach, blending Agile with excellent instructional design techniques. TorranceLearning projects have won IELA and Brandon Hall awards, and the 2014 xAPI Hyperdrive contest at DevLearn.
Publications include “A Quick Guide to LLAMA: Agile Project Management for Learning,” and “Agile and LLAMA for ISD Project Management,” a TD at Work. Megan has written for TD magazine several times, including the article, “What Is xAPI?” in the February 2016 issue.
