🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️
😩 Are you regularly stressed out, feel like you’re in over your head, and wondering how you ended up working at 2 am on a Monday morning to meet a project deadline?
You’re not alone: I, and much of academia and research, have regularly found ourselves in this position. It’s usually not because of a lack of talent, capability or passion – but often because we don’t practice good, effective and pragmatic project management.
The good news: there are lots of simple, straightforward things you can do about it (and some that take a bit more work). This is the topic of today’s #HackingAcademia video:
🔥 𝐑𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐞𝐥𝐭𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧
I cover:
📌 Why effective project management is so critical in a career – especially when it becomes impractical (and undesirable) to just work yourself ragged to meet a deadline
🧮 How specifying sufficient resources (funding, salaries, equipment) and realistic stakeholder expectation management before the project gets going (or is even proposed) can save you so much stress later on
🗺️ That Plan Bs, Cs and Ds are important to consider – but not to excessively investigate them before you know they’re even going to be in play
🎯 The “killing two birds with one stone” fallacy: don’t confound all the things you want to do and achieve with what this specific project requires. A constrained, stress-free project done well will help those other aims more than trying to cram everything into the project itself.
🔧 Not realizing that the setbacks you’ve experienced on previous projects are NORMAL, not exceptions. Talent being leaving or becoming unavailable (for myriad reasons), equipment breaking, methods not working – this is normality, NOT the exception
🕒 Being realistic and accurate about timelines: initially you can cope by just being pessimistic – but you can’t just pad everything out blindly: ultimately you want to be realistic: some things are quick, some things always blow out.
📈 A good project fulfills all its milestones: it does not (generally) overachieve in one area and completely fail to deliver in others
🧠 Identifying, recognizing and dealing with problems early is crucial. This is enabled by nurturing a team environment where:
🚨 potential issues are called out
🙅 no-one feels the need to get defensive
🤝 everyone moves to working together on a solution
👉 Easier said than done – but awesome when you get there.
Over 2 decades into my career, I’d say I’m reasonably competent at a number of things – but being an effective project manager is one where there is always so much to learn!
#projectmanagement #projects #leadership #management #deadlines #stress #worklifebalance #planning #gaantcharts #milestones #fulfillment #grants #fellowships #contracts #tenders #academia #research #university #industry #government
Full Video Notes
Early on in your research career, especially if you begin with something like a PhD, you tend to be mostly an individual contributor working on one core, all-consuming project. That is part of the fun of doing a PhD. If you stay in research or academia, what often happens (though not always – there are many different career paths) is that you gradually become a team lead, group lead, or even the head of a center or institute. Suddenly, you’re responsible for a much larger number of projects in parallel.
One of the biggest challenges during this transition is that the techniques you used to ensure the success of your early projects no longer work as well once you’re juggling multiple responsibilities. A great example is the strategy of working really hard to save a behind-schedule project. That might work when you’re a sole contributor, but it doesn’t scale. When you’re responsible for several projects competing for your attention, doubling down on work just isn’t feasible. You only have so many hours in a week – and you are not superhuman. That approach will eventually fail.
Some people are naturally good at project management, but for the vast majority of us – including myself – it involves a steep learning curve. For the first 10 or 20 years of your career, you may make lots of minor mistakes and perhaps a few major ones. It’s all part of the learning process. This video is for people who, like me, have occasionally struggled with project management and found themselves devoting far more time and emotional energy than expected to keep things on track. I’m going to share a few tips that I have found useful – and that I’ve seen help others manage projects more effectively.
Before the project even begins – and even before you’re awarded or win the project – there are some things you can do to make your life easier. Two, in particular, stand out. First, avoid underestimating the resources and time you will need. People tend to assume things will go smoothly and quickly, but that’s rarely the case. When scoping a project, you should allocate more time and resources than feels necessary. You might think you’re being excessive – but by the time the project ends, it’s likely you’ll wish you had asked for more. This includes resourcing like salaries for research assistants or engineers.
Second, focus on expectation management, especially in projects involving government or industry partners. Be realistic about what you can and cannot do. Flag potential setbacks or uncertainties early so that your collaborators enter the project with a clear understanding of what’s realistic – rather than being sold all sorts of unrealistically optimistic promises which of course mostly are not going to come true.
Once the project begins, there are several things you can do to reduce stress. One is to think about plan Bs and pivots. No project goes exactly as planned, and you’ll often be encouraged to think through fallback options. That’s useful – but only to a point. I’ve seen teams waste significant time developing detailed contingency plans for outcomes that may never occur. The key is to investigate these alternative paths just enough to validate whether your primary plan is solid. If your plan A has a major flaw, exploring plan B will reveal it. But don’t go overboard.
Another common mistake I see – especially among academics – is trying to use a single project to achieve all their goals at once. You may want to do great research, publish papers, secure future grants, and train PhD students. But one specific project doesn’t need to tick all those boxes. Trying to force it to do so often creates unnecessary complexity. Take publishing, for example. Some projects – especially in commercial spaces – are difficult to publish due to IP or practical limitations. If you try to force publication goals into a project that isn’t suited to it, you may create conflict or add unproductive stress. It’s okay if the project only supports some of your broader goals. Keep the project simple and focused, and let other activities grow around it.
Overly complex and ambitious projects tend to overwhelm the people managing them. And once you’re overwhelmed, you’ll struggle to do anything well – including the things you were hoping to accomplish outside the project. A smoother-running project gives you more breathing room to pursue other goals.
In both the early scoping phase and the actual execution, people tend to underestimate how long projects will take, how many setbacks they’ll face, and how much resourcing is needed. This happens even with experienced professionals. I see people fall into this trap regularly, and I’ve done it myself. A common phrase is, “Last time this took longer because of a setback,” followed by the assumption that it won’t happen again. But those delays are not exceptions – they are the norm.
Initially, you can cope with this by baking extra margin into your estimates. Even when you’re confident something will be quick, assume it might not be. This is a blunt instrument – though a helpful one early on. What you’re really aiming for is to develop a realistic sense of what will take time and what won’t. Some things go according to plan. Others take five times longer. Becoming good at predicting which is which is a key project management skill.
Academic researchers often go down deep rabbit holes, chasing their intellectual curiosity. This is admirable – and sometimes necessary – in fundamental research, but it can be counterproductive in a project with deadlines and defined deliverables. The goal in a project is not to underachieve across a spread of milestones, nor to overachieve on one metric while missing the rest. Stakeholders generally prefer a balanced and predictable delivery to sporadic brilliance with critical gaps.
Another thing that sounds obvious but is often neglected – recognizing and addressing problems early. In exploratory research like a PhD, taking three or six extra months to explore a new idea is sometimes acceptable. In structured projects with fixed milestones, that’s not a luxury you can afford. Learn to recognize issues early and deal with them quickly – otherwise, timelines and outcomes are in jeopardy.
Doing this well means building the right team culture. You need a dynamic where people feel safe to flag problems, even with their own work – where mistakes are normal and everyone works collectively on solutions without blame. If your team feels the need to defend or hide issues, you’ll find out too late to act. In contrast, if you can build an open, problem-solving culture, your project team will be vastly more effective and resilient.
In summary, many of the issues in poor project management stem from avoidable mistakes – unrealistic planning, trying to do too much, going too deep in one area, or ignoring early signs of trouble. What you want to develop is not perfection, but a repeatable set of habits and processes that allow you to consistently deliver results without burnout. You can’t control everything, but you can control how well you learn from experience – and whether your next project is just a little smoother than the last.