Think of every course you create as a project. That project needs management and planning, particularly if you more then one person is involved in the process. Wave has become one of the most critical tools for our company’s project management, and with 3 or 4 people all working on the one course at a time, good management is vital.

When it comes to project management there are so many options, so many different ways to achieve the same goal. The main area that drew us to using wave (apart from our addiction to using new technologies!) was the record keeping aspect. Being able to go back to the beginning, and see the process the project has gone through, and who did what. No information lost. No information hidden. If we need a diagram, we add pictures; and if we need more explanation on an area, we ask!

Not having any duplications was also a huge incentive. There’s nothing worse then getting to your Friday afternoon meeting, discussing your project, and finding out that the changes you made to a document are now irrelevant because of the changes someone else made! This combined with the fact that you know as soon as someone makes a change to the document, means that clarification can be sought quickly and easily, without needing to make time to suit every person.

We’ve found two main ways of setting out wave as a a project management tool. In the picture below each white box is a wavelett, and each grey box is a blip (reply). Each style has its advantage, and I’ve found that the main factor influencing which style we choose, is the size of the project we’re taking on.

When we plan a project online every person in the team sits down to input into the skeleton or plan of the project. We identify the key areas we need to address, and then using the ‘reply’ feature add in details, and pose questions and problems to the areas we’ve discussed. People also input ideas of the things they’d like to see in that section, or tools we could use to make it happen.

If information becomes obsolete, it can be deleted, and this information is never lost- we can always go back and re-play the wave from the beginning to retrieve the information previously written.