Some times I’ll pull a reading from the interwebs. In this case, I found an on-line site for IT professionals where they described how they manage the project process.

Step one: why do our projects go off the tracks?

Step two: reading this site. I pulled it down, erased the solutions part, so that students could try and generate their own ideas.

There was several places where we’re very different. We don’t have the hierarachy that most businesses have — there’s no leader, no designated project manager — there’s a kind of flatness in our classrooms that mirrors our school’s leadership structure. The student groups don’t have formal leaders, although most groups have one or two people they turn to. And sometimes we have the same problems that student groups have, i.e., when everybody is overwhelmed and doing fifty things, how do you hold each other accountable in gentle ways?

Cool conversation, though.