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INDEPENDENT SENIOR PROJECTLEAD

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^{I would like to write to commend Tikvah, particularly in the role of Coordinating/Leading. Having worked with Tikvah on a complex multi-stakeholder digital and flexible education project, I can vouch for her organisational qualities, her abilities as a dialogue leader, and her knack for harmonising several ‘voices in the room’ into a usable solution. Her knowledge of flexible, digital, and transferable education is very deep, but it does not limit her creativity in bringing about projects! I would heartily recommend her as Project Lead.}

Tom Ansell, Project Manager for the MOOC from within the institute who partnered up with us for the duration of 1 year, Coordinator Humanitarian Studies Centre, International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University The Netherlands

Curious?
If you’d like to know more, reach out to Tikvah on tikvah@studioblended.com or +31 6 42 47 29 69

Image: “Architectural Sketch by Cazú Zegers © Cazú Zegers – all rights reserved.”

As qualified senior advisors, and certified educational professionals, we operate as independent senior project leads for clients.

We bring in the experience of starting and scaling up the non-profit foundation STUDIOBLENDED, a studio that operates with entrepreneurial agility and plenty of experience in higher education.

Equally, we bring in our own CVs with relevant work experience in project management across a variety of sectors in our work prior to the establishment of the Studio. This includes working as project lead in NGOs as well aswithin institutes for capacity development in the Global South.

Our unique offer is therefore our ability to operate in highly uncertain, high risk contexts.

Our response is a more organic approach to project management, with incrementality, with flexibility and agility. We stay light in between institutions, organisations, businesses and people.

We can operate without an overly hierarchical structure given our familiarity with both the higher education and the capacity development sector.

We use rolling wave planning. An iterative, adaptive technique where near-term work is planned in high detail, while future work remains high-level until more information is available. This means we have space in our agenda, for whatever comes up, instead of fully blocking our calendars.

We are very mindful of our time and capable of making good estimates of how long something is going to take us. We work with flow to immerse ourselves in all that a product needs to reach saturation and take care to involve key stakeholders.

We oscillate well between deadlines – we take pride in our effective time management ability. Rather than working in a scattered manner, we love to work by themes for maximum impact.

We work systematically and strategically meaning we are able to anticipate and avoid operating ad-hoc. We love to give our full focus to one thing at a time in order to do justice to a product and project.

We love to pilot. Using our wealth of experience we design, test-run and develop durable products that last up to a decade. We work towards high quality end-products. We propose in-between products and gather feedback.

We seek dialogue, feedback and consensus on decisions. But equally we dare to move forward, driving project momentum and ensuring the product doesn’t become a watered down version but stays cutting edge. We listen to what the project matter truly needs. We give space to stakeholders, and have good experience managing this effectively. This sometimes may lead some to be disappointed, but in our experience eventually such cutting edge products stand stronger and are valued.

Certain academic or organisational cultures can be challenging in terms of reaching a decision and moving forward. We are dedicated to conclusions. We offer unique insights on this balance and for the social emotional dimension of transition and change within the team and key stakeholders.

We use a rapid review process. This means offering a draft output and whilst that is being reviewed, we work on the second output - and so on, successively. We cannot stress enough the importance of a clear and rapid review process. The thing to avoid and which adds most to costs is if we get feedback, we make changes, and then because the first round feedback was not conclusive or inclusive we need to aborb further inputs, go back and reviset again.

As senior project lead we can help by organising meetings with key stakeholders to gather their input. We switch fluently between different types of expertisepersonalities, cultures, generations. See for example our freelancer pool which creates ongoing collaborations in an agile form.

We are within budget, on time. We like to get it done whilst we are also sensitive to the academic culture of precision and care for content. We use deadlines to our advantage, creating a healthy push to be dedicated to conclusions.

What fits us in terms of the process:
- Autonomous thinkers, out of the box, refreshing
- Autonomous do-ers
- Work collaboratively to ensure coherence, quality and progress
- Incremental. Modular.
- Rolling wave planning
- Ensuring face to face check-ins where this is more effective
- Ensuring the progress in a more organic way
- Agile teams with a variety of skill sets
- Operating with flexibility in a context with many stakeholders and little hierarchical guidance
- Entrepreneurial
- Switch easily between deadlines
- Pragmatic Idealist
- Proactive, initiates (pilots)
- Inventive
- Knowledge of digital learning materials, open education and data related matters/questions

Topskills
- Project leadership
- Piloting - setting up the project, executing it and validating it
- Creating beautiful products as an outcome/output of dialogue
- Entrepreneurship
- Independent advisory at senior level
- Collecting and interpreting input and perspectives from “the field”
- Organising meaningful sessions/workshops with key stakeholders for maximum impact
- Networking
- Working hybrid
- Financially fluent
- The cutting edge of content, reflection and project management by staying abreast of latest research and practice models
- Translating complex concepts to crystal clear and applicable contours/instruments
- Signalling risks (content and project) and bringing them to the team
- Structuring abstract concepts and making them easy to grasp
- Strong communicative skills and ability to switch between and bring together different voices and perspectives

KEY PROJECTS

See our clientportfolio and Tikvah Breimer (MSc MAEd MSc).



Resilient education that stands the test of time - by design.