Tanya Goldhaber and Anna Mieczakowski - project control and implementation

Tanya: The aim of the project was to understand the impact that modern communications technology was having both on peer social groups and on the family.

Anna: I think the uniqueness of this project was that we didn’t just do either or, either qualitative or quantitative, we did both and we did it internationally. No other study that we know of out there has done that. We wanted to look at general public across different cultures. We had the initial meeting where we flushed out the things we wanted to achieve. We then had a number of actually, continuous communication. Every day we exchanged emails with different teams. Each month we had a big, few hours long meeting to see the progress that we had achieved and the actions that we have to perform in the future. We had multiple phone calls in-between different teams and one for example, one team would turn and say “Well I don’t really understand it, can you help explain this” or perhaps “I interviewed this family and I encountered this problem.” So there was continuous communication I would say.

Tanya: You can’t plan for everything, there’s no way. I don’t think there’s ever been a project in the history of the world where nothing unanticipated happened, where everything went according to plan. There was a lot of teams that we worked with later in the project that we were only sort of peripherally involved with at the beginning like the BT PR team. And I don’t think that we spent enough time really forming a personal connection with them. We always had a very professional business relationship, and I think when it came down to the last few weeks where it was really -- we all had to pull through for each other, I think lacking that sort of more personal connection actually hindered us a little bit. And I think that in these high pressure projects, actually having those personal relationships and forming them and doing some sort of team building is much more powerful than people realise.
Anna had an amazing leadership style. She was just so proactive about forming relationships with other teams. Making sure that everyone was on board, making sure that everyone was communicating. She worked harder without a doubt than anyone else on the project.
I mean on a personal level I knew that when I was having trouble either with other people on the project or finding time with my own research trying to work on this project as well she just always had my back. I always felt like I could come to her with problems. She was so supportive and I think that it is one of the most powerful things as a Project Manager you can do, is making the people on your team feel supported , making them feel like you’re there for them