James Barrett - project close out

One thing that’s very easy to forget is that every project needs an exit strategy. A good project has a beginning, a middle and an end and the exit strategy has to entail a series of elements which are equally important. And firstly, clearly as an academic project it needs a dissemination and it has to be brought to publication. Secondly and equally important it needs a progression strategy for its team because, the members who might come in as PhD students or as post-ops clearly have careers to develop and they need to be able to move on at the end of the project.

My contractor on the project started working with me in excavation in the Orkney’s as a PHD student when we were both at the University of York and then subsequently I worked as a Research Assistant on my project and then that lead ultimately to my delight to him securing a permanent job as a lecturer at the University of Newcastle, and that’s perfect. That’s exactly how one hopes a project will unfold. You absolutely need to both be and to be seen to be supportive of your staff and if it’s obvious that the purpose of this project is to temporarily employ somebody who will then go on to a different career, then the chances of recruiting a good team are very low.

In archaeology frankly and in any aspect of academic enquiry there’s sometimes that things go exactly as you might imagine and there are sometimes where what you find is completely different from what you imagined, and there are sometimes when that’s a good thing and there are sometimes when that’s a bad thing and obviously you have to go with the flow .

My previous excavation set out to answer a set of questions. We’ve discovered that underneath the Viking Age site there’s a whole other settlement from much earlier in time, from the migration period for instance. The middle of the 1st Millennium AD, which is equally exciting.

Project closing or your exit strategy should be very clearly in mind from the very beginning, because the first element of it, your project dissemination has to be your ultimate goal and you need to know what it is you’re aiming for and according to what time table. That archiving stage is very labour intensive and so it is critically important that it be costed into the process in terms of both financial resources to pay members of staff, but also just in terms of one’s thinking about the project and the amount of time and effort that you, as a Project Director will have to put in so that one doesn’t simply drop it when you have written the article or the book.