Intro to project management
Chelcie Juliet Rowell • Monday, July 11, 2022 • Advanced Digital Editing: Modeling the Text & Making the Edition • NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities
Speaker notes: I’m a librarian by training. In my job as a digital scholarship librarian within an academic library, I partner with disciplinary faculty and technologists on scholarly digital projects. They could be research projects, or they could be smaller projects based within courses. I often find myself the de facto project manager on these project teams.
What is project management?
A set of principles, methods, tools, and techniques for the effective management of objectives-oriented work in the context of a specific and unique organizational environment
Lynn Siemens. 2012. “Issues in Large-Project Planning and Management” [PDF], Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria.
Speaker notes: Let me call attention to a few characteristics in this definition: (1) Principles, methods, tools, and techniques — in other words, structures for thinking and collaborating. (2) Objectives-oriented work. You have set clear goals, likes Gabi’s research questions, research goals, and edition goals. (3) Specific and unique organizational environment. Sometimes I’ve found the disciplinary faculty I’ve worked with suspicious of project management practices because they seem so evocative of, well, everything that’s awful about being a worker in late capitalism. I mean, I get it. I, too, am deeply suspicious of anything that dehumanizes workers and turns us into widgets. That has not been my experience of project management practices, though. I have found that project management helps to make collaborators’ implicit assumptions about the purpose and process of the work much more explicit. As a result, I find working on scholarly projects that take a project management approach to be more pleasurable. If you or your collaborators associate project management with the evils of industry perhaps you would find it more appealing to think about project management in the context of the arts, like stage management in a theatrical production.
What are the goals of project management?
- Meet specified performance criteria
- Be within cost
- Be on time
Lynn Siemens. 2012. “Issues in Large-Project Planning and Management” [PDF], Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria.
Speaker notes: These three goals relate to each other. For example, if you are falling behind on the work, and you have no flexibility on time, you could throw money at your project (hiring more staff to share the work, for example). Alternatively, if you don’t have any additional funds, you could adjust the performance criteria to a lower level of quality in order to finish on time.
What is a project? Key characteristics
- Not regular operations
- Coordination of multiple tasks and resources
- Specific cost, time, and technical constraints
- Not regularly repeated
- Definite life cycle
- Specific purpose or contract
- Cross-organizational boundaries, dissimilar skills
- Relatively new or unknown undertakings
- Uncertainty
Lynn Siemens. 2012. “Issues in Large-Project Planning and Management” [PDF], Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria.
Speaker notes: What’s the difference between regular operations and a project? I work in libraries. Interlibrary loan is a well-established service that’s long been part of regular library operations. There are staff, training procedures, documentation, and fulfilling borrowing requests proceeds apace every day. Interlibrary loan is the greatest interinstitutional accomplishment of libraries! But it’s not a project. However, launching a new service, or forming a new service unit like a digital scholarship center — those would be projects. So projects are by definition doing something new! You don’t know exactly what you’re doing! And that’s okay. You do your best to estimate how much time and money tasks take, but you may learn that your estimates weren’t right. You learn, and you adjust as needed.
What are the steps of the project management process?
- Identify problem
- Generate alternate solutions
- Select solution
- Plan implementation
- Execute the plan
- Monitor progress
- Close out project
Lynn Siemens. 2012. “Issues in Large-Project Planning and Management” [PDF], Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria.
Speaker notes: You’ve completed steps 1–3 already! Using the project blueprint yesterday, you identified the problem, alternates, and selected solution. After today we’ll begin to shift toward planning implementation. In my experience, people in academia skip over planning implementation and closing out the project (reflecting upon what worked, what didn’t, documenting how the project parts fit together). And that means that executing the plan and monitoring progress is a bit…meandering. Let me also say a bit more about monitoring progress. Monitoring certainly consists of checking in with team members — “Hey, I see that you weren’t able to complete X task by the time we agreed upon. What roadblocks are you facing? When do you expect to be able to complete X?” But also monitoring consists of re-evaluating your project plan and adjusting as needed. I was chatting with Gabi yesterday. She shared that as she got closer to the end of writing her thesis and developing its accompanying edition, she found herself having to let go of some of her edition goals in order to finish by her deadline, which wasn’t flexible at all. She had to graduate! But re-evaluating those edition goals and clarifying which were in service of her research questions and research goals wasn’t a failure. It was part of the process in a project that involved a lot of uncertainty; it was an opportunity for clarification and focus. So in addition to coordinating your team to stick to the project plan, monitoring also includes adjusting the project plan.
The project plan coordinates the work
- Determining and portraying scope of work
- Identifying resources (staffing and funding)
- Scheduling work
- Determining budget
Lynn Siemens. 2012. “Issues in Large-Project Planning and Management” [PDF], Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria.
The project plan documents answers to essential questions
- What (project objectives)
- How (work breakdown structure)
- Who (staffing and assigning tasks)
- When (schedule)
- How much (budget)
Lynn Siemens. 2012. “Issues in Large-Project Planning and Management” [PDF], Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria.
What are the benefits of a project plan?
Partnership agreements, such as project charters and memoranda of understanding, express intellectual and even emotional support for projects; they universalize intent.
Burress, Theresa, and Chelcie Juliet Rowell. 2017. “Project Management for Digital Projects with Collaborators Beyond the Library.” College & Undergraduate Libraries, vol. 24, no. 2–4, pp. 300-321. See an open access version of Burress and Rowell’s article.
Speaker notes: I would argue — and I have argued in a co-authored article! — that the benefits of a project plan are not only operational, but also emotional. A plan clarifies the project purpose and process and helps people get excited to collaborate.
What is a project team?
A small set of individuals who work interdependently and are jointly accountable for performance goals. Often a project team includes:
- researcher or primary investigator
- project manager
- project members
Lynn Siemens. 2012. “Issues in Large-Project Planning and Management” [PDF], Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria.
Speaker notes: I took a different course on project development taught by Jen Guiliano and Trevor Muñoz at HILT (Humanities Institute for Learning & Teaching) at the University of Maryland. In that course, if I’m remembering correctly, Jen Guiliano stated very strongly that she didn’t think the researcher should be the project manager — that they’re two distinct and important roles. I agree in theory! But in a tiny team, maybe the researcher takes on a lot of project manager responsibilities. Or maybe you’re a team of 1! In that case, I still think that the habits of thought offered by project management are helpful for planning your solo work.
What is the role of the project manager?
- Managing the project day to day
- Establishing project structure
- Negotiating written agreements
- Monitoring project work
- Reporting progress
- Training and developing staff
- Developing a sense of team
Lynn Siemens. 2012. “Issues in Large-Project Planning and Management” [PDF], Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria.
Speaker notes: In practice, I find that these responsibilities are often shared between the researcher or PI and the person who’s serving in a project manager–like role. Perhaps that’s okay. What I’d say is to be explicit about which responsibilities which person is taking on. As I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve become more assertive about advocating for me to move from a de facto project manager role to a more explicit project manager role and consequently to take on more of the responsibilities named here.
3 templates for listing project team members
- Roles, responsibilities, funding sources
- Skills inventory matrix
- Responsibility matrix
Speaker notes: I’m about to offer you 3 different templates for identifying the people on your project, team, their areas of expertise, and their responsibilities. You may find one of these templates especially intuitive or resonant. Or you may combine them into a new format that makes sense to you. My intent is to offer a menu of options from which you can pick and choose.
Who is on the project team, and what are their roles?
| Name | Title | Responsibilities | Funded how? | Funded how long? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chelcie Rowell | Project Manager | Consulting with researcher and technologists, drafting project plan, setting meeting agendas… | Staff contract | Ongoing |
Module B1, Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, The Visual Media Workshop, University of Pittsburgh.
Speaker notes: The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap encourages you to think very broadly about who is on your team. Consider everyone who contributes to the content, context, and structure of your project to be part of the team. That could be developers who are working on your digital edition, users who are contributing via crowdsourcing, administrative staff who help to reserve rooms, library workers who are providing digital surrogates, institutional IT server space providers or external web hosting providers. Include people who are within your institution, as well as those who are without, if applicable. Under the ‘Responsibilities’ column, list all of that person’s responsibilities. Here I’ve provided a few responsibilities of a hypothetical project manager as an example, but it’s not a complete list. When you use this template, try to be exhaustive.
Skills inventory matrix
| Disciplinary knowledge | Project management | TEI encoding | UX design | Front-end development | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gabi | X | X | |||
| David | X | X | |||
| Elli | X | X | |||
| Chelcie | X |
Lynn Siemens. 2012. “Issues in Large-Project Planning and Management” [PDF], Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria.
Speaker notes: Here the rows are project team members, while the columns are areas of expertise needed to carry out the project. Again, note that my column list here is not exhaustive at all! As you’re making your own skills inventory matrix, you may identify many more relevant areas of expertise. You’ll notice that there are some skills that the project team is conspicuously missing: user experience design and front-end development. The project team has two options for bringing these skills onto the team: identifying new team members with those skills, or learning new skills themselves.
Responsibility matrix
| Task | Gabi | David | Elli | Chelcie |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Articulate research questions, research goals, edition goals | primary | supporting | ||
| Write project charter | supporting | primary | ||
| Implement search | primary | supporting | ||
| Implement map | supporting | primary | ||
| Test map | primary | supporting |
Lynn Siemens. 2012. “Issues in Large-Project Planning and Management” [PDF], Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria.
Speaker notes: Personally I like the responsibility matrix a lot. Here, the tasks are rows, and team members are columns. For each task, we identify one primary (the person whose primary responsibility it is) and at least one secondary (people who play a supporting role for that task). It builds in some intentional redundancy, so if one team member goes out of commission, another team member is able to move from a supporting role to a primary role for that particular responsibility. This model is also helpful on smaller teams, where maybe everyone is the researcher and no one is the project manager. Can the members of that project team break down their tasks and identify particular tasks where someone takes a leading role and someone else takes a supporting role, rotating these roles for different tasks?