Human-Centered Design Project Manager

Background:

The IRC’s Airbel Impact Lab designs, tests, and scales life-changing, cost-effective solutions for people affected by conflict and disaster. By applying the IRC’s deep technical expertise and field experience with a range of skills from the behavioral sciences, human-centered design, rigorous research, and multi-disciplinary problem-solving in humanitarian contexts, we work to develop breakthrough solutions that combine creativity and rigor, openness and expertise, and a desire to think afresh with the experience of a large-scale implementing organization.

At Airbel, we begin our projects with behavioral scientists understanding individual behaviors, and designers creating new products and prototypes. We continuously iterate, drawing on these skills to then test, pilot, and scale our innovations.  These behavioral scientists and designers ensure that our projects are being driven by our clients’ needs and experiences.  Airbel’s behavioral scientists & designers are currently working to bring 3-4 Airbel projects to scale, including our Pop-up Tanzania Education project, which brings autonomous tablet learning to last-mile learners in hard-to-reach areas in Tanzania. 

Scope of Work:

Many Airbel projects have begun prototyping new way of working that shifts research, ideation and prototyping to be led and carried out by local teams and collaborators who are based in the country where we are working. We’ve got an impressive collection of partners and staff across the regions we work in who make this shift possible. This new model is an improvement in many ways but also requires more communication, coordination and alignment among the increased number of stakeholders. More perspectives are harder to coordinate and synthesize but ultimately make the work better.

The human-centered design project manager will work across 3-4 innovation projects including a new Health program being prototyped and developed in two countries and pre-existing Autonomous Learning projects based in Tanzania. Each of these projects are currently being managed by designers and are in various stages of development.

The human-centered design project manager will be responsible for ensuring the project timeline stays on track by coordinating schedules, key meetings, regular touchpoints to keep projects on time. They will ensure necessary project and reporting data is collected and participate in and take notes from meetings, preparing weekly reports from project work, and generate action items. They will support essential reviews, touchpoints and structures that keep our projects safe and strong including; Institutional Review Board Ethical Review processes, summaries of team progress and draft decks, and draft donor communication.

Deliverables:

1. Submission of weekly project reports to share with partners and donors that track project progress, show alignment, goals, risks and action items.
2. Completion of IRB Ethical Review Submissions - including prototyping assets, research protocols and consent forms to ensure ethical and timely reviews of innovations being tested.
3. Finalization of Pilot Review Report - tracking the implementation, support needed and challenges that arose across the pilots.
4. Finalization of Evidence Review(s) – syntheses of evidence from projects across the portfolio and how it aligns with our Theory of Change (ToC)
5. Workplan development – develop high-level draft workplan(s) for the team to review and commit to
6. Develop team communication strategy –  develop internal and external communication strategy to streamline reporting and information sharing both within the IRC and with external partners
7. Commitment tracking – ensuring all deadlines are being met across the workplan(s), including reminding focal points of upcoming deadlines (i.e. for reports or submissions), and confirming commitments have been met