Page 219 - DMGT302_FUNDAMENTALS_OF_PROJECT_MANAGEMENT

Fundamentals of Project Management

Notes field copies of a paper you have published. Keep in mind that people who are familiar with your
work, but who are not direct collaborators, will have to submit letters for your tenure.
These people might also invite you to give talks or suggest that you participate in study sections
or become part of a meeting planning team.
As you work on the project, revise the list as necessary. Categorizing audiences is less difficult
than it may look, and you don’t have to start from scratch for every activity. Many of the same
people are likely to be on your audience list over time for different activities.

Defining Who Does What and When

The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is an outline of all the work that will have to be performed
for your project. To develop a WBS, start with broad work assignments, break them down into
activities, and divide these into discrete steps In the jargon of the project management field, an
activity is a task that must be performed for your project and an event is a milestone marking the
completion of one or more activities. You will want to list on your timeline resources and the
people that will carry out the activities, so that you can successfully complete some milestone
event–for example, getting a paper accepted, a grant funded, or a difficult technique reduced to
practice.
The WBS is one of the most important elements of project management as it will help you
schedule the project and its parts, estimate resources, assign tasks and responsibilities, and
control the project. (For more information about developing this kind of outline, when you
develop a WBS, think in one- to two-week increments. You probably wouldn’t want to include
detailed plans for activities that take less time (e.g., experiments to be done each day). However,
the level of detail you include in your WBS depends, in part, on who is doing the work. Most
undergraduates will need more detail than an experienced postdoc or technician. It may be
useful to teach your trainees to think in this time- and resource-aware way, perhaps by, early in
their stay in your lab, having them write out detailed weekly plans or design flow charts for
how they intend to work through a difficult technical issue at the bench.

Question: Is project management a top-down or a mutual process?
Answer: It must be mutual. For the best possible outcome, you need both staff insights and
“buy-in.” Project management does not say, “Forget thinking and just do what I say.” It’s a
process for identifying what to think about, not how to think about it.
Question: If I have experiments A, B, C, and D, is it reasonable to do detailed planning only for
A first and deal with the others later?

Answer: That may be reasonable, but what if B isn’t entirely dependent on A, and you could have
done some work for B or any of the other experiments without waiting until A was done? Project
management tools and software can help you see where timelines may differ.

Did u know? The WBS is one of the most important elements of project management as it
will help you schedule the project and its parts, estimate resources, assign tasks and
responsibilities, and control the project.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. The ....................... is an outline of all the work that will have to be performed for your
project.

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