James Barrett - control implementation

I am an archaeologist and I conduct my excavations in the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland and I have been working there for almost 20 years, but most recently we’ve been excavating a Viking age settlement in order to understand how the Viking age happened really. This was a project where we had 3 seasons in the field. The first 2 seasons we were able to work more or less according to plan.

In the 3rd season a key member of our staff who was the main supervising co-director of the project was offered a lectureship 3 weeks before we were supposed to go into the field. There were only 2 options, one was to shut down at very short notice and the other was to find another way to re-distribute the responsibilities for that core member of staff amongst the rest of the team. So then about 10 days into the project then we had another -- quite wide ranging, open discussion about how will we modify the objectives of the project given that we can’t go as fast and or how can we make them comfortable that they will actually be able to do what is necessary to do in the time available and with the resources available and that was a hugely valuable de-fusing exercise and after that really we just got on with it and we did the job.

Your key role is to make sure that your crew are able to do the job and are happy doing the job and sometimes it’s a matter of accepting the fact that that magic isn’t going to happen and instead having more direct managerial relationships with individual members of the team so that one person has an area of responsibility which is distinct rather than over lapping with another person and that can be managed very successfully as a sub component of the project.
The single most important thing that I have learnt in 20 years of running excavations is that problems are the norm rather than the exception and the moment you realise that, rather than your life being very difficult all the time it becomes very simple. And the glass is half full rather than being half empty and increasingly your role as a project manager becomes solving those problems so that the crew -- the team can do what it is that their needing to do to make the project successful.