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Apr 06
When I started BioData I had a clear idea where I was going. I’d seen science from the inside and knew what change I wanted to promote.
This blog post is my reply to a Science Careers paper that was posted a few years back. In short, the article suggests that young researchers do not believe in applying (PM) Project Management to research while veteran researchers do.
I disagree. Project Management in research has nothing to do with age. We (shameless self promotion here) have about 650 active projects on our BioKM platform. They are being used mostly by students – not by their managers. Why?
Our research project module was born after I saw there was just too much stuff in some of the accounts. There was no way to understand the research story – you had a plasmid but you couldn’t understand why it was there, if it was ever used, what were the results, which protocol, etc.
Since I don’t like to write software that no one uses, I decided to talk with a few researchers that were collaborating with us at the time. All said – “No project management in academia,” “it will never work,” “you can’t manage research,” “you can’t really plan ahead.”
We heard that, and yet all that discouragement helped us understand the real challenge. Project management in research is a totally new concept and should be addressed in a different manner and with a different set of tools. Ganntt Charts won’t work, constraints and other limiting factors are obviously there, meeting deadlines is there, but they are just not the point.
The point is to understand the path and the questions you are asking. The point is not to repeat yourself (well at least not too much), and to let your ideas and imagination thrive so you can see the progress of your research. A good tool (even a notebook) would be a place for you or any future researcher working on your project to understand what you did, share your ideas and pick it up to take it elsewhere.
A research project is different from an industrial projects since it is mostly a sequence of question and answers, not milestones and products.
Research can be managed it just requires attention and thought.
Apr 06, 2010 @ 21:01:42
Jonathan,
I appreciate the plug for my old Science Careers piece. You wrote:
>>Project management in research is a totally new concept and should be addressed in a different manner and with a different set of tools.<<
Well, it's not THAT new; I organized a session on the topic at the first HHMI/BWF Laboratory Management course in 2001. The goal was to adapt the tools of conventional project management to a discovery environment. You'll find some remnants in Chapter 7 of Making the Right Moves, HHMI's Lab Management Book –
http://www.hhmi.org/resources/labmanagement/moves.html
You might be interested to know — and may already know — that there's a lot of research going on in business-management circles about managing knowledge work, which is a very similar challenge. The emphasis is mostly on software development — that is, managing software-development projects, not creating project-management software. There have been several books — including one co-written by my brother, Robert Austin, now of Copenhagen Business School: Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work –
http://www.amazon.com/Artful-Making-Managers-About-Artists/dp/0130086959
Anyway, thanks for resurrecting an old article.
Jim Austin, Editor
Science Careers
http://www.sciencecareers.org
Apr 07, 2010 @ 16:49:42
Hi Jim,
thanks for your comment and links, it shows that despite all progress in technology around us, it somehow skiped research management. I see labs around us organize their research in the same way it was 20 years ago (I dare to say even more).
Better equipment, maybe different research questions but no real progress in the way research is organized and managed.
The software is not the issue – it should be a reflection of a thought process, I fear too few researchers are committed to.
Apr 07, 2010 @ 17:00:46
Thanks, Jonathan, for your reply. Though you may have disagreed with my take on the age difference from 8 years ago, I think we agree that deploying appropriate management tools in a research setting is a very good idea — with the emphasis on *appropriate*.
Furthermore, we may very well be entering (or, more likely, have already entered) a new era of big science in the biomedical realm that calls for a kind of insight into biological systems that our brains can’t fully contain (my brain, anyway). In other words, it may soon become necessary to practice discovery in the context of great complexity, combining the adaptivity required by discovery with the complexity of old-style projects — discovering, and then assembling, if you will, a battleship (or something even more complex) piece by piece.
Jim Austin, Editor
Science Careers
http://www.sciencecareers.org
Apr 07, 2010 @ 18:05:06
Hi Jonathan,
I’ve noticed actually (and I’m heavily involved in Project Management for years now) something different when it comes to age: Veteran Project Managers do not believe in the so-called Project Management 2.0, while young Project Managers are heavily involved and actually praise its benefits.
In non-university research projects, Project Management is heavily applied whether Project Managers are old or young. As for the universities, research projects are governed by processes long before project management became mainstream. I think what veteran researchers advocate for is not project management as we now know it, but a resembling process to initiate, manage, control, and close a project.
Thanks for sharing.
PS: This is my first visit to your blog and i will check biodata’s website.
Apr 09, 2010 @ 19:29:28
Great articles. I like the look of your product Jonathon and I agree with your sentiment on KM and PM. My group runs a clinical and basic science management database. Sometimes trying to get senior faculty involved is like pulling teeth (although they love it when they’re hooked). Getting their RAs, Postdocs and students is much easier.
May 19, 2010 @ 13:56:55
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