Tanya Goldhaber and Anna Mieczakowski - project planning and communications

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. So we’re communicating differently through modern technology and how is that changing the way that we socialise and think. This was an inter-disciplinary project and it was run internationally in the USA, UK, China and Australia to get a multi-cultural view of the effects of modern communications technology on communication worldwide.

Anna: We worked with our public teams at BT and also their public relationships company. Very early on, on the outset we decided that we have to run it as one team. They came from, obviously from industry. We’re in Academia. We tried to make that collaboration as effective as possible by having great communication. We knew that we would have to come up with some surf lines to satisfy the public relationship people at the very end, but never throughout the project did we compromise our record of integrity and the integrity of the research.

Tanya: Managing the relationships are important because they’re sponsoring your research. So as a company they’re giving you money and it’s your responsibility to deliver a result that they can use and that’s useful to them. That said, managing the relationship is important because their goals might be different from yours. Their goals are obviously commercial in nature and your goals as an academic are really to do good, high quality research. It might be tempting in the short term to give into demands of a corporate team, but ultimately not maintaining that integrity does no one any services, because taking a long-term view, if it comes out that your group doesn’t do high quality research or research that’s sustainable over a long period of time it discourages other people from trying to do research with you.

Anna: There are three major areas that I would say here. First you need to establish as early as possible what needs to be done within the project and to create as detailed plans as possible. Secondly you need to then convert it into effective action and thirdly you have to make everyone feel accountable and responsible for the project. We always throughout the project said “we” never “I”. Even if we have done the bulk of work in terms of putting the research together we respected all the other teams equally and we gave them the credit for all their achievements as well and that also translated to our colleagues at BT.