Translating your research goals into your work plan
Chelcie Juliet Rowell • Wednesday, July 13, 2022 • Advanced Digital Editing: Modeling the Text & Making the Edition • NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities
On Day 1, our project management session focused on articulating the audience and purpose of your digital edition — essentially a project proposal. Then on Day 2, I introduced some of the high-level definitions of project management, and you practiced different ways of identifying project team members.
I mentioned that it’s common for units at colleges and universities who support digital humanities and digital scholarship (like libraries and digital scholarship centers) to have a service model that starts with consultation: A researcher comes and says I have an idea. The researcher meets with one or more folks from that service unit. After one or more consultations the researcher submits a project proposal. At a certain point in project development, a team moves from project proposal to project plan (or project charter — I tend to use plan and charter interchangeably).
The project plan is a turning point in the life of a project. You’re moving from research goals (which is the heart of the project proposal) to the plan of work. Additionally, your team is committing, logistically and emotionally, to this plan of work.
Today I’m going to throw you into the deep end. Choose one of the two project charters below, from either Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship or Yale’s DH Lab:
- Varner, Stewart. 2014. “Project charter.” Stewart Varner: Scholarship, Libraries, Technology (blog).
- Yale Digital Humanities Lab. 2019. “Project charter.”
Take 15–20 minutes to draft your project charter using either of these templates.
Having attempted to draft your project charter, what questions do you have? Where are you confused or feel out of your depth? Beginning tomorrow, I will provide more scaffolding for drafting specific components of the project plan, such as communication norms, tasks, and schedule.
I also want to acknowledge that all of my sessions and activities assume a project team with multiple members. I know that many of you are solo researchers (a team of 1). I still posit that a project management approach can be helpful for structuring your own work. For example, I’ve heard Jennifer Guiliano talk about project managing the writing of her own dissertation. Brilliant! Another resource those of you who are solo researchers may find useful is the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity Resources (NCFDD). Many colleges and universities are institutional members; if yours is, then you can access many NCFDD resources for free. I genuinely love their Monday Motivator email newsletter. And I would say that many of the weekly emails are project management for solo researchers by another name — for example, crafting a semesterly strategic plan. So, I offer this as a resource for those of you who are a team of one.
Also, as a side note, I will say that I have heavily used these project charter templates in the past. But lately the resource I am finding most useful for structuring my thoughts around service development in academic libraries is this resource, which my colleague at Tufts, Kylie Burnham, introduced me to when they took a for-credit course on program evaluation in Tufts’ museum education department:
- W.K. Kellogg Foundation. 2004. “Logic model development guide.” Battle Creek, Michigan: W.K. Kellogg Foundation, January 2004.