Philip Guildford - project problem solving

Nobody should ever feel embarrassed talking about a problem on their project, even if it’s small, because it just saves everyone’s time, so much to sort it out right at the moment it pops into open. I remember early in my career I didn’t ask people. My first job, and I made mistakes during that which I had to put enormous effort into rectifying, and that’s same in absolutely any profession. Inevitably it happens in academia as well. The biggest anxiety will be “I have to understand everything, I have to do everything, and everything will be my fault if it goes wrong.” That leads to people taking too tight a grip of every aspect of the project, every fine detail and dictating to people what they do, and that can be a disaster because the key thing about having a good project is motivating the team, and people are only motivated when they’ve got clear roles within a project, they’ve got a clear job to do, and they’re allowed to do it. So being a good project manager is a mysterious combination of keeping an overview, maintaining that vision and clarity, but also just lightening the grip a little bit so that people are having a good experience of working on the project and getting towards the end point together as a team.

I think what can happen is that the academic in charge might set things in motion and expect things are going to happen and if they hear nothing, they think it’s all good, and it’s sort of left chugging along. And so there’s not that reviewing of how things are going, does the whole plan look good? Not just these individual tasks but the whole plan, and within that, looking at some of the risks which could afflict the project. “What would happen if this rig doesn’t quite work as we expected at the end of the day? Do we have an alternative? Could we fall back and do something else?” So I think it’s that sort of debate that reveals the risks. If communication breaks down between our own project team and a sponsor, then the first thing we do is call a meeting with that sponsor and put all the cards on the table, alongside a plan for going forward which might include altered objectives for the end of the project. We put that whole thing down in front of the client so that they can see it, and we ask them how they feel about it, where they want to head next, and consult them thoroughly, and we don’t hold anything back because there’s no point in concealing things, honesty is definitely the best policy.

I think academics have lots of people who they can consult if their project is going a little bit wrong or they’re worried about something, and they can certainly look just within their own team, because what they might well find, quite likely to find, is one of their PhD students or post docs is actually rather gifted at organising things and project managing. So they’re well worth having a frank conversation with them, laying it on the table and saying “What do you think?” That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, just go and talk to them, or if they want to be a step away from that lab location, they can come and have a chat with someone like me. When I’m running projects all sorts of problems still arise, the only difference is I feel more confident about addressing them, and I’ve sort of got the basic toolkit of methods for doing it, but number one is; I see a problem and I try and deal with it.