Your Research Project

How to Manage it

Andy Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134288151
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book guides the student through the transition from passive learner to active researcher. Covering everything from choosing and refining a research topic to writing the actual report, the book shows students how to manage their workload, and how to approach the viva. Key areas covered include:

• personal time management
• aims and objectives
• working towards success
• common problems
• the final report and publishing your results
• the viva voce examination.

It is ideal for all final year undergraduates and students on Masters degrees, and contains useful information for course supervisors and tutors to pass on to the students who approach them for advice.

Chapter 1
You – the project manager

Introduction

You are probably reading this book because ahead of you there is a major piece of work for which you are personally responsible. This book aims to help you through the process of managing this effectively.

Although this book is primarily intended for students in the final year of college or university embarking upon their solo or Masters project, the principles covered are the same for any piece of project work for which you do not yet feel prepared.

In this opening chapter we will examine your change in role from being essentially a reactive student to becoming a proactive project manager. We look at how the very nature of the work changes with a solo project, and acknowledge that many students are ill-prepared for this change. We then focus on the most important transformation that you will have to make, that is playing the role of two people. Once you can successfully flip between ‘project manager’ and ‘project worker’ in a structured way you will see your project starting to take shape. This chapter will help you to face up to the changes that need to be made in order to carry out your major piece of project work to a high standard.

Your change in role

Much of the work you have done up to this point may be regarded as reactive. You were given an assignment, told what the task was, given some starting information, given a strict deadline and guided as to how much work was expected of you. You then reacted to that information and provided a piece of work that fitted those specific criteria. Often this type of assignment is intended to test how you have absorbed and processed knowledge, and the boundaries of this information are usually defined for you in the syllabus. Most exams, essays and written assignments done at schools, colleges and universities are of this type.

And then comes the major solo project. This often represents a large proportion of the marks on a course, yet most students find they are unprepared for it. It is the pivotal point of a degree where the emphasis changes from responding to strictly defined tasks, to being in charge of an entire research project. It is as though for many years you have been a member of a backing group, reliably following written musical instructions along with your fellow musicians, and then suddenly you find you are running the show. What is more – the show does not yet exist. You find that you are no longer dealing with a pre-defined syllabus, and you are now engaging, by definition, with unbounded and possibly unknown material. You suddenly find there are no agreed right or wrong answers, and you may have to reconcile apparently contradictory information from others working in the area. You are often given one big deadline (the end of the project), and it is up to you to manage the entire business from now until then. It is no wonder that it can feel daunting. The purpose of this book is to help you through the process of transforming yourself from a diligent student into a dynamic and successful project manager.

The dual role (of Worker and Manager)

Perhaps the most important skill you will develop as part of running solo project is playing two distinct roles; that of Worker and Manager. Most of us play different roles in different situations (e.g. student in lecture, friend in a social situation, leader of a group, parent, etc.), but rarely do we need to alternate between two roles in one situation. However, this is exactly what you will need to do in order to run a successful project. This section will help you identify what these roles are, and why both are important to the outcome of a large piece of work.

The Worker

You are in ‘Worker’ mode when you are just getting on with things. If you have made it to your final year, you are probably quite used to being a Worker because this is what your education system has trained you for. Being in Worker mode is a good thing as long as you know that this is the right thing for you to be doing at this moment. Unfortunately, the only way you are going to know what is the right thing for you to be doing is to have a higher-level picture of all the things you need to do, and their relative importance and timings. This is where the Manager comes in.

The Manager

All of us have experienced our inner Manager. Have you ever just had to sit down and make a list of things you needed to do, because there was so much floating around in your head? This is your inner Manager wanting to get some control of your life. You will sometimes feel the need to stop what you are doing and take stock of your progress on a number of topics that are lurking within your brain. This gives you the opportunity to get a bigger picture and set what you are trying to achieve into a higher-level context.

Dual, but mutually exclusive roles

It is really important that you do not mix the roles, or constantly flip between them. For example, when you are working on something (say, writing a chapter of a report) you really want to be in Worker mode where you know that it is absolutely fine for you to think of nothing else for the next two hours. However, you will only be able to get to that state if you have done some management activity first; for example, a weekly review process where you have considered all the topics that are ongoing in your life, along with their relative importance and urgency, and thus made a detailed plan for the week (which turns out, say, to include two hours of writing Chapter 1 on Friday). When you carry out a task you need subconscious reassurance that it is the right thing for you to be doing. Without this reassurance you will worry, panic and lose concentration, because your inner Manager cannot really rest until it has been through the process of putting everything in order.

Equally importantly, you will find that you cannot do your managerial tasks while trying to be a Worker. How can you think at a high-level about all the things you need to do while you are staring at a computer screen containing the low-level detail of the work, whether it is computer code or part of an essay? You need some time away from where you would do the project work. Sometimes this means literally moving somewhere else to get away from it; leaving the lab, shutting down the computer, or taking a pencil and some paper to a coffee bar, or going for a walk outside but taking a notepad; anything to remove yourself from the context where the Worker is normally active.

The Manage–Work cycle

You will need to develop a way of working that you feel comfortable with, but here is one method that you may wish to start with. For any new task, however big or small, allocate a proportion of time to manage it before you start working on it, and some time to review it once it is complete.

Let us take an example most of you will have had some experience with. You will probably be used to the exam technique of setting aside time at the start of an exam to read through the questions and make a plan for which ones you are going to answer and what approach you are going to take. Likewise you may have been advised to take time before the end of the exam to read through and review your answers. Those who practise this discipline are carrying out the Manage–Work cycle, in that they are setting aside some time to take stock of the big picture before focusing on the task at hand. This then gives them the confidence that they are working on the right things. After completing the work they then return to a managerial level to review what has been done. Nearly everyone who does this says that it is the best way to deal with exams, and yet every time they do it they have to fight off the nagging panic that they are ‘wasting time’ and should just be ‘getting on with it’.

In general, it is best to apply a proportion of management time to any incoming task, no matter how big. This works for an urgent request that needs processing in the next ten minutes, and equally for a major project with a final deadline which is nearly a year away. Both cases require some calm, considered thought at a managerial level. Those people who are regarded as ‘keeping their cool in a crisis’ typically do this by insisting on a degree of planning even in the most desperately pressing circumstances. The general aim is to insist on planning time – even if this seems to be taking away from the time to do the task – because you can then proceed with the confidence that you are doing the right task. Once your working time is complete, you can go back into the management role, and review the completed work within a higher-level context. To summarise, it is good to run a project as a Manager, but to ‘dip down’ to a more focused Worker level for an allocated duration to complete one task, then ‘come back up’ to review progress.

In the next chapter we will look at some everyday examples from the world of projects to illustrate how this might work in practice.

Other roles to avoid

The dual role of the Worker and Manager is what is needed to get you through your project. It is important to keep these in balance. Too much management and nothing actually gets done! Too little management and the wrong things get done. However, as well as the Manager and Worker roles, there are other, less productive, roles that people can play during the lifetime of a project. Perhaps we should take a few moments to look at these in case you recognise some of the characteristics in your own methods of working.

The procrastinator

Procrastination is the act of putting off until some time in the future what should be done now. This is not to be confused with ‘active deferral’ – where a proper decision is made that this is not the time to do a particular thing. The procrastinator is so daunted by each new task they receive that they attempt to run away from either managing the task or working on it. Consequently, they fill their time with unrelated stalling activities. This can take the form of actively focusing on something totally unrelated, such as a social activity, or passively avoiding starting to work, for example sitting hopefully at a desk for long periods waiting for inspiration. Please do not misunderstand – life should have plenty of opportunities for socialising and daydreaming, but not as a masking activity that ultimately prevents you from making progress on your major piece of work. This is the Ostrich effect – the hope that by sticking your head in the sand the problem will somehow just go away. Sadly, procrastinators tend to go through life oscillating between a state of denial (‘I haven’t got a project to do, honest, I’ll go for a drink instead’) and panic (‘Oh no, my 3000 word essay really is due in tomorrow morning’). Unfortunately, a solo project seems like an easy thing to procrastinate about; it is scary, it is big, and there is lots of time for stalling activity. It is amazing how fast time will pass, and the pressures of starting a project late and completing it under panic conditions are strongly not recommended.

If you have a tendency for procrastination the remedy is quite simple – you must just start. Once you have begun you have crossed the main hurdle, and you may even find the creativity beginning to flow. How many times have you put something off for ages, only to complete it in a few minutes and think, ‘that wasn’t so bad; why did I avoid it for so long?’ If in doubt, just start with something small on the project. In later chapters we will discuss how to divide the project into manageable sections.

The perfectionist

Some people experience the opposite problem to the procrastinator – they can start easily, but can never finish ‘because it’s not perfect yet’. Perfectionism is a serious impediment to successful time management, and we will consider this in more detail in the next chapter. If, as a Worker, you over-run your allocated time in a vain attempt to make something perfect, you are now using up time that was allocated to another task. By all means strive for excellent work, but learn to stop at the end of your time-slot, or hop up to management level and have a conversation with yourself that should go something like this:

See Table

It is probably best that nobody witnesses you having this conversation with yourself! (It is usually just a mental process where you weigh up alternative viewpoints.) Actually this is about the only time that you need to acknowledge the needs of the Worker and the Manager at the same time. Effectively, you are negotiating between the high-level context of the Manager, and the recent practical experience of the Worker. You will either come to the conclusion that the Manager was right, and you need to move on to the other tasks, or you decide that improving the current piece of work really is more important than doing the tasks you originally planned. Either way this is a management decision. The Worker makes a request, but the Manager decides.

To overcome any of your perfectionist tendencies you must stop when your Manager said you should stop (because it is never going to be perfect), or hold a management-level meeting to decide if the current priorities are correct.

The dependent worker

This is a Worker who has not yet accepted that they also need to be a Manager. They refuse the managerial role, and therefore constantly look to others to provide the structure that they are lacking. Later in the book we will examine the role of the supervision process, but the dependent worker does not use it properly. Instead, they pester their supervisor and insist on being told what to do, exactly how much to write, which papers to look at, how to spend their time, what is the ‘correct’ method, etc. So, instead of growing in confidence with their own managerial skills they become dependent on other ‘gurus’ or ‘experts’. However, as most supervisors will tell you, the idea of the supervision process in a solo project is to turn you into the expert for your particular topic, and to decrease your reliance on others.

If you find yourself feeling like this, it is probably because you are so used to being told what to do that you find it hard to acknowledge that you are now in charge. What you must trust is that playing the management role is ultimately very fulfilling. It is this role which makes it become your project, and in the future you will look back on the solo project as one of the most rewarding growth experiences of your entire education. People have often described it as ‘learning to grow up’.

The over-keen worker

You might find it strange that a book about successful projects should criticise students for being over-keen. Many times students are so enthusiastic with the initial excitement of a project that they omit the managerial level in a misguided attempt to use all of their available time in ‘getting on with it’. Many people when faced with a large and daunting project do a very silly thing – they just dive straight in and start working. From my experience of supervising software projects I know this is a particular problem. It seems to be a specific temptation when computers are involved – when faced with a large task, why not just sit down at the computer and start coding? But how do you know what you should be working on? Only when the project folds in on itself because it is too complex, do these people realise their mistake. Sometimes it is then too late. The over-keen Worker must insist on being driven by their Manager, so that they can then channel their enthusiasm into the right work.

Summary

This chapter has introduced a concept that will be referred to throughout the book – that in order to complete a project successfully the whole process needs to be managed well. This management role is different from the equally important task of working to actually get the project done. You must play both roles, and be willing to change between them, yet keep them in balance. While you are reading this book you will probably be in ‘management mode’, as by definition you are not ‘getting on with it’. However, many years of experience have shown that those students who take the time to train themselves to be effective self-managers are those who produce the best projects.

I wish you success from the start. In the next chapter we will look together at the basic problem the Manager has to face – dealing with time.

Chapter 2
Personal time management

Introduction

In this chapter we will consider in some depth the issue of how to manage your own time in the context of a major solo project. You have been put in charge of a large block of time, and you need to use it wisely. This chapter discusses some well-tried advice for making the most of the time that you have available, and for balancing your work commitments with the rest of your life.

The most important thing to acknowledge is that you cannot The most important thing to acknowledge is that you cannot actually manage time! The phrase ‘time management’ is a bit of a misnomer, because time just moves on regardless of what you do. Better phrases would be ‘time awareness’ or ‘self-management’,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Overview of the book
• Chapter 1: You – the project manager
• Chapter 2: Personal time management
• Chapter 3: Your project’s aims and objectives
• Chapter 4: The literature survey
• Chapter 5: Working towards success
• Chapter 6: Communicating with others
• Chapter 7: Common problems
• Chapter 8: The final report
• Chapter 9: The viva voce examination
• Chapter 10: Publishing your results
• Bibliography