What Project Managers Do

Introduction

Open textbook project managers may be librarians, instructional designers, one of the authors, or another professional. You may manage one project or several. Your responsibilities may vary depending on the project, strengths of team members, and areas of expertise. Keep in mind, too, your capacity. Don't feel as though you have to do everything! Alternatively, you could consider using this list as a way to divide responsibilities.

Throughout project management, your most important role may be that of communicator. Communicate as much as possible, in a variety of formats, with every stakeholder at every stage. Seriously, you can't communicate too much!

Guiding Questions

As you review project management roles below, here are a few guiding questions to keep in mind:

  1. What project management experience can you leverage for the roles described?
  2. What support do you need to develop project management capacity for local open textbook projects?
  3. Are there partners or colleagues you can work with in some of the roles described?
  4. Is there funding for outsourcing services? For example, working with freelancers.

Below are common tasks involved in making a book. Select what matters most to you, your authors and program:

Phase 1: Launching Projects

  • Manage open textbook grant proposal process, including assembling a group to evaluate proposals
  • Meet with authors to kick off project and clarify expectations
  • Develop textbook structure and elements in collaboration with authors, instructional designers
  • Manage project timeline and author (and team, if applicable)
  • Ensure Creative Commons license (CC BY) author education and compliance
  • Ensure accessibility, through author education and compliance

Phase 2: Developing Projects

  • Provide open resource support
  • Coordinate freelancers
  • Coordinate peer review
  • Clean up manuscript
  • Add metadata1
  • Provide funds and/or budget management and invoicing

Phase 3: Completing & Sharing Projects

  • Host completed open textbook file(s) in institutional repository
  • Market open textbook
  • Report on impact, including adoption rate and student savings
  • Develop a plan for textbook maintenance

This list can be overwhelming. If you have the budget, you may want to outsource some of these responsibilities. For example, some members of the Open Education Network work with Scribe Links to an external site.. 

Adapted from Defining Your Role Links to an external site. in Authoring Open Textbooks by Open Education Network (CC BY Links to an external site.)

1. The ALA Glossary defines metadata as "information used to describe a work (1) to enable discovery and use. There are three main types of metadata used to describe various aspects of data: administrative metadata, descriptive metadata, and structural metadata."
Levine-Clark, M., Carter, D. T. (Eds.), (2013). 

Additional Resources