project planning(?)

Coming from an industrial background academic life is quite a different culture. There is far more autonomy in the roles, from technicians to PI’s there seems to be a lot more self directed work with a far less formal hierarchy. I find this a refreshing and liberating experience compared to industry which can often be suffocated in bureaucracy and deliberately restrictive pecking order. Recently I have been struggling to make progress in my project, bogged down in a cloning step that is threatening to sink the whole project. I have attempted to create milestone targets and interim reports but all of these have gone in the mists of time and any attempt to produce interim reports or project updates is rejected by my supervisor as unnecessary paper work. I have struggled to install any kind of organisation or direction with my supervisor and have hammered away in the lab watching the calendar pages spin by. I am in the weird inverse position of failing to explain and fully articulate the dire situation this project is finding itself in, which I thought was meant to be the other way around, with the boss chasing the over-relaxed student around the lab.

Although many industry project planning sessions are an excuse to drink coffee and an opportunity for management to exert their authority over their minions it is strange that academia has never adopted any formal planning in research projects. If done properly, effective project planning can attempt to provide structure as the project begins and early warnings of things starting to slide. Gateways can be useful to decide when it’s time to stop, and milestones even if missed or not achieved present formal time points to re-assess progress or the project’s direction. While team members can become bogged down in the details of their own tasks and problems, the landmarks on the project plan are opportunities to step back and re-assess what everybody is doing. Perhaps things will change when funding dries up or the beneficiaries want to keep a closer eye on where their money is going if there’s a greater risk of loss in the global economic melt down.

Until then, I continue to wander on….