Three tips for your project management

One of the first things I learnt when I shifted from quantitative to qualitative research was that not all tasks can be done by software. Many can only be aided. Yes, there is now AI, and we could argue a whole lot about what it can do, but let’s not. Let’s get to the point.

I expected NVivo to do the analysis for me, after a few simple instructions, like statistical software. But it doesn’t: NVivo is a tool to organise my analysis. So here we get to project management: there are many project management tools that can help you organise your activities, but you are the one who needs to know how to do project management. And to help you, here are a few tips from someone who uses no fancy project management software at all: just excel spreadsheets.

1. Don’t forget the less day-to-day or practical things. Sure, you need a scope, a budget, deadlines, a gantt chart or activity timeline, a table of parties involved, meeting minutes. But you also need the things that you think you don’t need: a risk management tab, highlighting all the risks that you can think of, with likelihood and severity, and, for each risk that has at least average likelihood or severity, at least one strategy to prevent or monitor the risk or address it when it comes up—you will be grateful to your past self in some crisis and prevent some more; and an impact tab, with the expected and desired short and long-term impacts of the project, and pathways to achieve it, within and often beyond your control—because if you are not interested in the impact of what you are doing, why are you even doing it?

2. Be consistent and organised, but don’t let project management manage you. Schedule in some time to review project management each week (or when convenient, as long as it’s regular) and stick to it. But make sure your regular project management activities are ones that actually help you keep track. Be flexible: some tasks may help you in some periods of your project and life but not others. At some point in my PhD I was doing many little things all the time rather than focusing on main aspects of the project: that was stressful and made me feel that I wasn’t doing much. I started to write weekly reports of all that I had done—to comfort myself that I had worked well—and to-do lists for the following week, to have a worry-free weekend. It helped me, until it became superfluous and annoying: so I just stopped. Sometimes I have detailed 12-week or 16-week plans, other times I just need to know broadly what the tasks for the next weeks are. And that’s ok for me.

3. Always “over”estimate: you won’t regret it. You have probably heard this a lot, but that’s because it’s critical. Overestimate timelines, overestimate time for bureaucracy and minor tasks in your week, overestimate expenses. There will always be tasks that you didn’t account for in your timeline, or that you thought would take much less, or extra costs you hadn’t considered. That’s why “over”estimating is in inverted commas. And if the opposite happens, that will be a nice day for you—but don’t take that possibility as an excuse to set way too high expectations for yourself.

So, manage risks and impacts, be consistent but flexible, and always “over”estimate. And remember: project management tools are not the project manager, you are!