Pualena introduces the concept of agile project management for digital products, specifically for online course creation. She discusses the strategy behind the methodology, the tools available to use, and the benefits of using an agile method. You’ll hear how organizing your workflow, tracking your time, and creating an adaptable framework helps you serve your clients better and sets your business up for long-term success.
Some of the themes Pua shares in this episode include prioritizing your ideas in a backlog, breaking tasks into smaller chunks to show progress, and tracking your time to create more freedom. She also highlights how an organized system can help entrepreneurs, especially creatives, avoid and manage challenges such as scope creep and setting boundaries. And, for listeners who stay until the end, you’ll have an opportunity to provide input on the scope of the podcast in 2024!
Resources discussed in this episode:
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Contact Pua Pakele | RBL Media:
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Transcript:
Pualena 00:00
You want to make sure that the setup is intuitive for you and give yourself time to learn the platform, learn the features, do a free trial. And once you've decided on one that works for you, make sure that you're then able to communicate that to anybody that joins your team.
Pualena 00:24
Hello, and welcome back to the Course Creators Academy podcast, I'm your host Pua. And today, we are talking about something a little bit different. I have been very lucky to have a sort of mentorship relationship with somebody in the product development space, and project management space. And I've been learning some really, really cool tips and tricks and strategies on project management. And, you know, since I miss solo entrepreneur, I have not really been on any, you know, product development or design teams, at least not from a, I guess, corporate or traditional standpoint. So, my experience in this space has very much been from a freelancer standpoint, which does typically sort of take on some of the traditional project management roles and strategies, but it's very flexible. And the only people that I really need to be accountable to are my clients, I don't necessarily have a design team, a development team, a project manager, or I actually do have a project manager, I don't know if anybody listening is a past or current client, but I do have a Kelly, and I hope that every business owner can find a Kelly because she is out of this world phenomenal. She is a project manager, client support, all things tech troubleshooting, she's amazing. So I do have one person that I sort of internally report to. Other than that, you know, it's, it doesn't necessarily… the only person who, who is affected, if my internal organization is not super, super stringent, is me. As long as you know, the client work gets done, things are, you know, tested and they're of quality, it can sort of stay in my head, right. So if we think about it, if I'm building a page, and I know all of the things I need to do, I need to test, etc., I just do it, because nobody needs to understand where I am in the project other than, you know, the regular check-ins with the client. So, in our project management platform, we typically have four columns, we have to do in progress, in review, and done. And any task or ticket can sort of migrate between those statuses. And we can leave notes, you know, Kelly, and I will drop comments to each other. Sometimes our clients are also in our project management platform, which happens to be ClickUp, I highly recommend it, I will drop a link in the shownotes. If you're interested in checking out. ClickUp It is a very robust, very powerful, very easy to use, easy to learn, and beautifully customizable platform. And I'm happy to share how we use that. But it's, we have this sort of very simple setup. Now I have been coached by somebody who has been a part of several corporate-level product teams, and she's teaching me about something called Agile Project Management. And so I thought it would be really interesting to apply that to something like agile project management for digital products, and more specifically for online course development. And when we take a broader look at what this is, it's, you know, a way to organize your tasks. And whether you're developing a product, a course, a book, a podcast, you know, social media campaign. You'll all have these, this is useful for everything that you're creating within your business. But this is the Course Creators Academy podcast and so I thought it would be interesting to apply it to the course space and just really do a very deep dive into what this is. And I will caveat this by saying agile project management is a very general term for something that is very, there are many ways to set up an agile project flow and agile workflow. There are many structures and it really depends on the type of project you have, the type and size of your team and the training that you are, able are interested in sort of investing in and investing in for your team. Because this is, you know, something that if there's just one person who's not bought into the system, the whole thing will, will fail. And this is true for any project management system or platform.
Pualena 5:19
Quick story, I used to work for Yelp. I was an intern when I was in grad school. And the, it was very interesting and sort of humbling, because a lot of business owners would come up to me when I was working these marketing booths at like, street, you know, food truck fares, or you know, I'm, I'm an intern, I'm 22. And people come up to me, they're like, I hate Yelp. Like, well, could I offer you this cool little, like, dog bandana. And I can let my manager know your feedback. But you know, we didn't develop the app, we're just here to spread the word to the people. I don't know it was interesting. But I, I mentioned that because we used I'm not sure if they still use it, the CRM of choice for Yelp at that time, which I think was like 2013 was Salesforce. And I was expected to go into Salesforce with every interaction, every new business that I came across every business owner that I met, and input their contact information and details about our conversation, what they do, and how we, you know, what, what they did with us or for us, or what we did for them. And I realized very quickly that this only works if everybody uses it. Otherwise, your day-to-day workflow becomes very inefficient. And you're asking questions. And the reason why you're asking the questions is the answers aren't where they're supposed to be. So, when we talk about things like meetings, we want meetings with other people to be a high-value activity. When you are having a meeting with your team, or your clients or any collaborative space, this should be full of, you know, high-level conversations, and brainstorming and idea, ideating. And all of those things that happen. And that's sort of the magic that evolves when humans come together and start to create together and bring their creative energies together. When meetings are less efficient, is when they are sort of just regurgitating things that could be an email or you know, a list of updates, you should be able to read updates. And that's where solid project management platforms and systems and processes come into place where if you have a project management flow, that is maximized, maximally efficient, and effective, people are in there making updates at such high detail, that you can go in and see exactly where the project is, and exactly where each to do task or item or ticket is at any given moment. And it's essentially a live up to date snapshot. So that in these meetings, you can ask high-level questions. Hey, I see this ticket is here in the blocked column. And it's been there for two days, let's talk about the blockers that you're experiencing, and how we can move this ticket through. Right? That's really good brainstorming material for an internal project team meeting, not tell me where we are with this project. And believe me, I have been there, it's really, really easy to get there. And it's really, really, it takes some time, I like to say, you really have to slow down and fine-tune this process in order to speed up it's worth it because it makes your process and your entire workflow more efficient, but you do have to dedicate the time and energy to transitioning to this workflow, and putting the practice in and sort of holding your team accountable and giving them the resources that they need to be successful with it. All that being said, what exactly is an agile workflow or agile project management?
Pualena 09:23
So, understanding agile project management may mean to understand where it came from, and at the very foundation, it is an iterative and very flexible approach that originated in the realm of software development. Right. So, it is built on the Agile Manifesto, which prioritizes individuals and interactions, working solutions, and customer collaboration. So, in essence, it's about embracing change, right? And how do we put change into a framework? Right, software development is innovative. Innovation. It's it signifies change, right? We are changing the environment in which this software is going to live, we are changing the way that it impacts its users. And when we go through these development cycles, what we're doing is recommending change based on a number of factors, whether it's feedback, whether it's testing, whether it's data brought in from, like, observe the way that people are using specific platforms, or if your software already exists, you can poll your existing customers to see where their pain points are or where they're getting stuck, where there's opportunity to shift and change. For course creators, right, we are innovating as well. We are creating courses because we want and see a need for something in the market that either doesn't exist or doesn't exist in the way that you envision your course to serve. Right. If I’m a fitness trainer. Here we go again with that example. There are, I would guess, millions of online courses about fitness, fitness trainers, CrossFit people, gymnastics people, yoga instructors, people who do foam rolling and stretching, it is anything that you want is already out there. It already exists. Why do I need to make another course on tabatas? Buy my course you get 20 Tabata workouts for $9.99? Why do I think people need that? Because I believe I have a framework, I have a solution to a gap in the market. I'm creating change. Hopefully, I'm creating a little bit of competition for the people that are already out there. Because my product is so good that we may take customers from other people, that's business. We're not necessarily going out and like individually poaching people, but somebody may resonate with the way that you teach tabatas more than they resonate with the person that they're already purchasing a Tabata course from, you know, this is a terrible example. But, you understand what I'm saying. So, I digress. Agile, project management is about embracing, and formulaically migrating through a proposed change. Okay. So, when we talk about online course development, we want to talk about all of the components of creating your course, that may need to go through some sort of transformation, whether it's creating it for the first time, updating existing content, getting feedback, et cetera, et cetera. I am going to sort of go back and forth between traditional agile setups. And what we probably will do as single entrepreneurs or small business owners, because while you probably don't need to be as detail-oriented for the way that you set this up, it can be very helpful to keep you on track. And more importantly, should you bring somebody on your team, whether it's a video editor, a content developer or an admin position, we want them to be able to jump right in. And with a few training sessions, deeply understand how you've set up your agile project management, and how they can just jump in right away and start using it. So the way that I've learned to set this up, is we've been using Trello, between me and my coach, although things go from Trello for our learning purposes, and I will move them into ClickUP. The platform doesn't matter. It's the system that you use. So we've created these statuses. And we've got essentially a prioritized backlog. So that is your brain dump, you are just figuring out what needs to get done. And you throw it there, right? It doesn't necessarily have a prioritized order yet. I will get there. But if you have anything that comes across your plate, either you're starting a project and you know, these are the things that you must do in order for this thing to launch. Or as you're building and things come up or as people are giving you feedback, you continue to add things to your backlog. Now every day you want to get in the habit of prioritizing this backlog, otherwise it will things will get lost. There are methods to prioritizing which I won't get into here because that's probably another episode in itself. But you do want to start to figure out what your framework for prioritization is, I believe we've talked about the Eisenhower decision matrix on here, which is essentially, the act of assessing your tasks based on urgency and importance or lack thereof. So that is a legitimate way to look at prioritizing your backlog. But for now, I'll trust that you understand how to make things a priority, whether it's energetic output, whether it is urgency dependency, again, we can talk about that more in detail. So you're going to, it will become a prioritized backlog. From there, essentially, ideally, you'll take the ticket or the task at the top, and bring it into a column called in progress. It is what it says: you're working on it. And it will stay here until you're ready to test. So if you're creating your course content, drag that over into in progress. And if you need to break that up into smaller tickets, do that, right, because we want to be able to see progress. So if you are creating written course content in the outline form, you want to you know, under that ticket, you'll say Create Course Outline, okay, in progress, then you'll move it down the line of the statuses and to done eventually. Then from there, maybe you need to create your video scripts. From there, you need to film your videos from there, you need to edit your videos, you need to create your worksheets, right? So all of this falls under creating your course content. But you do want to chunk it down a) so that you understand within that larger framework what needs to happen. And then also so that you can visually show progress to somebody who may jump in and look at this, right, because if they just see, you're still working on your course content, and it's been in progress for six days, that's a it's sort of a red flag, like what is keeping you stuck here, versus if they see that it's broken down into mini chat mini tasks, or mini chunks that are slowly being worked on and completed. You're showing progress. The next status here is blockers. So let's say we are in the middle of recording our videos, and your camera breaks. You drag that into blockers and your blocker is camera broke. And you need a solution. Okay, so anything in the blockers column? It's also a red flag of like, how are we going to troubleshoot this? And what do we need to do to get it back in progress ASAP, because anything in blockers is basically paused. It's not moving forward until there's a solution. So when you start your day, and you're looking at, you know, all of the tasks that you have ready to tackle, you may consider starting with the blockers just to make sure that you have eyeballs on it to say like this is troubleshooting in progress, or I haven't looked at this, it's still in the blockers and nothing can move forward or this task can't move forward until I figure it out. And then creating tasks that help you to do that.
Pualena 18:08
The next status is in QA or in UAT. QA is quality assurance. And a lot of times you know, this is a very common phrase in the software development world. But it may not be something that you're familiar with as a solo entrepreneur, somebody who may just be entering the course creation space, the digital space. And it is a very important step. Essentially, you're testing. UAT is user acceptance testing, same idea. They have slightly different definitions. But we are going to simply look at this as testing your product. So, when you've got your course content created, when you've built it into your platform, you want to test it thoroughly to make sure that every bit of this user experience is smooth. Until you've thoroughly tested you should not take anything to market. And a very key step in this process is to clearly identify what those steps in the testing are that make your product accessible or acceptable to take to market, right? So, oftentimes this is referred to as the acceptance test criteria. And you absolutely cannot pass this through to the Done column, which essentially is like the launch column the to you know, deliver to market column until all of those test criteria have been checked off. And these are criteria that you ideally want to identify at the start of the creation of this task. So if you are creating a task for developing, you know, the back end or the customer facing online course, area, you have all of these criteria that you want to include in that maybe you have smaller tickets within that larger task. In the creation of that task, identify the test criteria, I want the clients to be or my students to be able to receive announcements by email, I want them to see this, be able to see the status of where they are in the course, I want to send them reminders, if they haven't logged in for 30 days, you know, all of these things. If these are parts of the UX that you have envisioned for your course, they must be identified in detail, in the test criteria of those tickets. Okay.
Pualena 20:56
I don't want to lose you. And I know that this may, I might be starting to use information or language that is it's feels a little bit foreign. It's okay, it's sort of, it felt foreign to me as well until about a week ago. And it's, you know, language that, again, the product development industry is familiar with. And, so just in in a best practices situation, should you take your digital product to another company or start to talk to other people, maybe they want to invest in it, maybe they want to purchase a license, they may use similar terminology. So it's to your advantage to just at least let it become a little bit familiar to you. You don't have to use it in your day-to-day processes and efforts. Okay, where were we? We touched on tools just a little bit. Yeah, again, this is not a one-size-fits-all all methodology. So, you know, if you want it to geek out on this a little bit, and look at different agile workflows, and what they are, what they mean how they're set up, you may want to look at strategies like Scrum, Kanban, and Lean are sort of three of the commonly used methodologies. Each of them are a little bit different. And they have a different place in the overall sort of marketplace of design and development. But each one, you may find one, you're like, wow, I really, I really jive with how this is set up. And then you may look at one and you're like, this does not make any sense to me at all. So you know, watch some YouTube videos to get a little bit of visual representation of what each of these may include. But it really can help you to get organized to really get a good feel for your flow for some of the like design and development sprint that you might want to do. And it's really, really helpful when we look at overall big-picture planning. You know, a lot of people are doing 2024, content calendar planning, and having a very, very solid project management system can be really helpful in creating a content calendar that is realistic based on all of the things that you have going on. So one thing that I want to mention, within every single ticket or task or to do item, we want to talk about time, in two ways. We want to be able to estimate about how long it's going to take us to complete this task. And then we also to the best of our ability, want to start to see, in actuality, how long did this take me? Now this was one that I really had to, like, swallow my pride on. And that's because I was always sort of proud that I am an entrepreneur, and I don't have to report my time to anybody. I don't have to trade my dollars for hours. And so never again, do I have to track my time for anything ever. You know, and it was it's not that. I'm not that opposed to it. You know, I I'm not that bratty about it, but it was sort of triggering for me because I spent all of this time and effort really creating this, this lifestyle that on the surface could allow me to work anywhere to you know, have flexible hours and, and all of this and then all of a sudden I'm like so you want me to track my time like absolutely not. And what I realized is when we track our time, we are actually creating more freedom for ourselves. We can very clearly say based on historical data of tracking similar tasks, I know that a task like this will take me about this long, I can schedule it in, I can estimate when I will have it done. And I can plan accordingly. Which means if I want to, you know, go surfing one morning from 10am to 12pm, I know that when I come back and I get back to my desk about 1pm, that I won't be able to either complete this task that I've realized, you know, over time, will take me three hours, or I won't have time today to complete this task. And it's a very, like, it's a yes or no. And if I'm planning my week, I know that I'm surfing on that day. And so I'm not going to quote to the client that I will have it done today, I'm going to quote that I'll have it done, let's say today's Wednesday, I'm gonna quote that I'll have it done on Friday. And I will deliver it on Thursday. Right, we want to over… no, under promise and over deliver. One of the worst things you can do. And I've been guilty of this, and I've actually lost clients from this is saying, I will deliver this to you on this day, and then defaulting on that and not doing it. If you are going to do that if you need to life happens, I get it. Communicate, holy smokes. And again, I definitely learned this one the hard way. We are all a work in progress. And if you resonate with this, it's not too late. This does not define you, you get to keep improving who you are and how you work every single day.
Pualena 26:33
Okay, whoa, that was a tangent. Let's get back on track. Here we go. Let's talk. So we talked about tools, right? Again, like, explore what works for you. Here are some of the most commonly used project management platforms, it doesn't mean that these are any better or worse than things that I may not list off that you may be excited to try or that you're already using. ClickUp. I think it's like the industry standard. If it can literally fit anybody's needs. They do have a pretty great free option. There is Trello, obviously, JIRA. So Trello is a product of JIRA, and JIRA is a they have a lot of project management tools. So you might want to just check them out. Asana is one that I've used in the past, and I know many people use it, there is Monday.com, there's I got there so many. My brain is like overwhelmed. There's also like, like, Apple has free ones, Google Calendar, you have tasks that you can create, like, you can use a spreadsheet, right? It doesn't, the platform platforms are designed to make these processes easier. Things like ClickUp actually have agile workflows built into some of their templates, which is really cool. But it's not complicated to set up. And what matters is that the system works for you. Okay, it just takes some some playing with I will say two, there is a little bit of a learning curve. So if you are a solo entrepreneur, I would give yourself a month to try these platforms, there's Base Camp, I forgot about that. You want to make sure that the setup is intuitive for you and give yourself time to learn the platform, learn the features, do a free trial. And once you've decided on one that works for you, make sure that you're then able to communicate that to anybody that joins your team. So, anybody that may, you may need to train on that platform, just make sure that you understand it deeply enough to be able to communicate how you want people to use it.
Pualena 25:41
All right, just a couple of things to keep in mind, and reasons why this workflow can work so well. So, we're going back to the framework of creating this around or for an online course. Something that we like to do as entrepreneurs and creative people is continue to add, add, add, add, add ideas, and features and resources and worksheets and downloads. And this adds to the scope of the project. And even if we don't have clients, if we are our own client, we can impose scope creep on ourselves. So scope creep is something that let's say like, it happens to us a lot actually, as web designers, especially for people who are you know, we're web designers for online course creators and so we do our initial call. Cool, you need a website, you need one course you need a funnel to your free lead magnet perfect those are the deliverables will define what each of those include. And let's do this. As we build Oh, instead of a PDF, I want a mini course for my lead magnet. Okay. All right, technically, that does not infringe on the contract. So okay, we'll build that. Oh my gosh. You know, as I build my big course, and as I build out this mini-course, that sort of is supposed to feed into the big course, I realized that the big course actually needs to be three small courses. But that's okay, right? Like we've already done the content, all you need to do is break it up. Okay, well, I guess Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then we'll actually each of the small courses also needs its own sales page and its own sales funnel, can you break that over, you know, and so it just becomes this, this monster that's never done, and it never ends. And it's always the fault of the service provider, not setting their own boundaries. Yes, as a client, you should be mindful of this and not take advantage of people who just say “yes” to you. But that happens, right? That was a kind of an extreme example, usually, it's a little bit more subtle. And perhaps both parties don't even realize it's happening until you have all of these new deliverables in place. And this happens, because you don't have a solid sort of visual plan and specific tickets on what exactly you need to be working on from start to finish, and timelines. So due dates, estimated time for delivery, all of these things really, really matter. So when you set up your agile workflow, you know, these are exactly the things that I'm focusing on here. If you want to add to that, you're adding new tickets, and you were very intentional about making sure you know where that fits in, if that's going to cause a delay in your launch plan. Like you're going in and you are making those adjustments, like manually so that you are have full awareness around the impact of adding to your plan. Okay.
Pualena 31:48
Okay. Yeah, I am just looking through my notes. I think that covers it, I feel like that was a lot. And I hope that this was valuable. I hope it didn't confuse you. Again, there are so many resources out there that walk you through agile workflows, it can be a little bit jarring. And like, just, it's a different way to look at a project and create a system around a project. And if you're somebody, I think creative people tend to not be super like, organized, for lack of a better word, right? We kind of like to fly by the seat of our pants, and say ”oh I love this idea and this idea and this idea.” And so what I encourage you to do, if this feels like you, that sounds like you, and you often find yourself craving a little bit of structure, and you know, things like structure and deadlines will actually help you to stay accountable and enhance your creative energy and your creative flow. Knowing that you're not going to stress about all the things that you keep in your head. And I'm with you on this, we can find a balance, right, we can figure out how to take something so strictly structured as an agile workflow and create a space that gives you just enough structure to feel like you're in control and that you have sort of start and end each of these projects instead of these ongoing brain children that never actually come to fruition. It allows you to actually follow through with what you say you're going to do, which you know how many people are out there? Oh, I started writing this course. I started filming this course. And I never finished it. I started writing my book, never finished it. I thought about launching a podcast and I got like my cover image designed by someone on Fiverr. And I bought a microphone and headphones and a, you know, nice camera, but I never actually started my podcast, right? So, it keeps us accountable and sort of nudges us along our proposed timelines. Especially for people who are solo entrepreneurs. We need something because we don't have someone to push us. Right.
Pualena 34:19
Okay, well, thank you for listening to this if you found this valuable. Oh, something I wanted to post anybody who is kind enough to stay all the way to the end of this episode. We are wrapping up 2023. How that is happening. I don't even know like did this year, not just start. It is past mid-October and it's just blowing my mind. And I am sort of thinking about the pivots and the shifts and the ways that I wanted to align things in the new year. And one of my themes for next year is simplicity and alignment. And I have a business RBL Media RBLmedia.co is my website and I have the course creators Academy podcast. And this all made sense because I was a digital media creator and designer and developer for people who have online courses. And I am shifting my target audience, sort of broadening it just a bit. And would love to also broaden the audience and broaden the focus and the sort of impact that this podcast has to include maybe like people who don't have courses or want courses, or are course creators. I love talking with business owners, from all different industries who are innovating and are creative and who are rebels in their space. And so I'm considering changing the name to either the RBL Media Podcast or Rebels in Business Podcast or something that aligns my brand, brings in that rebellious energy. Because I think business owners are innovators and as innovators inherently we are rebels because we think outside the box and so I would love your thoughts on that any sort of initial reactions that you have, as I talk through that with you hear any feedback, any ideas that you have around what that could be? And I am excited to bring you along that journey with me. So, on that note, keep crushing and I will talk to you soon.