Our job titles rarely cover the full extent of our work. Far more people manage projects on a day-to-day basis than those with the Project Manager title. That’s why the Coax team is talking to people from other fields and different sectors to see how they manage their projects (and what we can learn from them). This is the second installment of our refreshed Coax Q&A series.
“If you’re Type A like me, chances are there’s a little part of your brain that believes every project would be easier if you could just clone yourself and do everything. Resist that part of your brain. It is wrong.”
Vitals
Name
Hannah McGregor
Occupation
Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University
Website
hannahmcgregor.com
Twitter
@hkpmcgregor
Tell us about your current role(s). What kinds of things do you do every day? What does your job usually entail (for those of us who might not know much about it)?
I’m an Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University. That means I divide my time roughly evenly between teaching courses (at the undergraduate and graduate level), research, and this third category that we refer to as “service” but mostly consists of sitting on various committees. Being a professor is at least 25% meetings; nobody ever tells you that.
My main research area these days is podcasting: I make podcasts and I study podcasts as a still-pretty-new publishing phenomenon. So you could further subdivide the “research” component of my job into things like applying for grants, working on collaborative projects, managing research assistants, recording and producing podcasts, and of course, reading and writing. (The phrase “publish or perish” is a truism in academia for a reason.)
How much are you managing projects and people? What kind of projects? Give us an example.
A lot of my research is collaborative, which means I’m often managing two or three projects at a time; if you also count the courses I teach (a lot of university-level teaching is essentially project management), then I would be managing four or five projects each semester.
Secret Feminist Agenda, a podcast I’m making, is a great example of the kind of complex and collaborative projects I am working on. On one level, it’s a podcast that I’m working on by myself, so I’m responsible for finding guests and scheduling recordings, producing and publishing episodes, and managing social media responses, all while trying to consistently grow podcast listenership.
But Secret Feminist Agenda is also the pilot podcast for a collaborative project I’m working on with Wilfrid Laurier University Press—we’re trying to develop methods for the peer review of scholarly podcasts. This aspect of the project involves a research assistant managing transcriptions, a collaborator across the country taking the lead on the peer review, regular presentations at conferences. Lots of moving parts.
Secret Femistic Agenda
Secret Feminist Agenda is Hannah’s weekly podcast about the insidious, nefarious, insurgent, and mundane ways we enact our feminism in our daily lives.
What’s your approach to managing projects and people? What works when you need to move things forward?
Project management is a tricky beast in academia. We have to do a lot of it but are almost never formally trained in how to do it effectively. I was almost done my Ph.D. by the time I finally took a dedicated Project Management course (offered at the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria). It was there that I learned about project management systems, effective scheduling and goal setting, methods for managing communication, and so on. The stereotype of the scatter-brained professor isn’t completely inaccurate, but I think it’s because we’re usually managing half a dozen projects without any knowledge of how to do so effectively.
I still have a lot to learn, but right now my key takeaway is how incredibly important the first few weeks of a new project are—setting clear roles and expectations for all participants, establishing objectives, timelines, and outcomes (as well as contingency plans), setting up a method of communication that works for everyone. Without those things in place, projects can go sideways in all kinds of unexpected ways.
But if projects get stalled or derailed, it’s a lot easier to figure out what’s wrong if you have had a clear plan from the start. That applies to teaching, too. Nothing can replace a well-thought-out and carefully designed syllabus with clear learning goals, assignment scaffolding, a reasonable reading list, and lots of opportunities for students to ask questions and get extra help.
How has your background, education, or past experiences informed the way you manage projects?
There are two norms in my field that I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time trying to unlearn. The first has to do with research. The field I’m trained in, literature, really values solo scholarship over collaboration. I love collaborating, but the joke that it’s “twice the work for half the credit” is something I often have to work against.
Why bother managing a complex project when I could just do it alone? Because I love the experience of working with different people who think in different ways than I do or have different skillsets. I end up editing a lot of essay collections and organizing a lot of events because I want to bring different people together and see what exciting new ideas they can come up with. But it’s a lot of work, for not a lot of credit, and I catch myself getting frustrated by all that undervalued work a lot of the time.
The other part of my education I’m often trying to resist is how to run a university classroom. If you see a university professor in a movie, chances are they’re standing at the front of the room, lecturing to a bunch of bored students. That’s an approach that some call “the sage on the stage,” and a lot of professors love it because you get to be the centre of attention and sound really smart. But it’s not a particularly effective way to teach. Studies show that most students check out after twenty minutes (and many before that). They’re much more likely to retain information if they have a chance to move around, discuss ideas with one another, or participate in activities.
Teaching a class that centres the students by prioritizing their voices and experiences over yours can be tricky. But, from a project management perspective, it also makes a lot more sense: you have to include everyone, give them an opportunity to build new skills while taking advantage of the ones they already have, and maintain open lines of communication so that they can tell you if something isn’t working. None of that is possible if you’re standing alone at the front of the classroom, opining.
Witch, Please
Hannah’s fortnightly podcast about the Harry Potter world by two lady scholars.
When it comes to managing projects, what do you wish you were better at? What do you wish you knew more about?
I’m constantly looking for better ways to manage multiple projects at the same time. I can be a bit all-or-nothing with my attention and energy. So when I’m teaching a course a lot of my research projects get tossed to the side, and when I’m excited about one research project I can end up ignoring the others. I wish I knew more about keeping multiple balls in the air at the same time and moving effectively between different projects. Right now it feels like trying to plan things across different dimensions: trying to figure out not just how all the pieces of one project fit together, but also how those various projects fit together with each other.
What’s your best tip or an approach to projects that works for you? Why do you think it works? What’s one pitfall you’ve learned how to avoid?
If you’re Type A like me, chances are there’s a little part of your brain that believes every project would be easier if you could just clone yourself and do everything on your own. Resist that part of your brain. It is wrong. The ways in which other people are different from you—think differently, work differently, have different skills and values and priorities—is precisely the value of working with others. Sure, that’s where miscommunication and frustration can arise, but it’s also where the best, most exciting and unexpected ideas come from. The flip side of that is to make sure you know your collaborators and teammates as well as possible at the beginning of a project, so you know best how to organize things. It’s all about the team relationships.
“The ways in which other people are different from you — think differently, work differently, have different skills and values and priorities — is precisely the value of working with others.”
What’s one thing the average person doesn’t know about the kind of work you do?
Most people outside of the university have no clue what academics do, besides the aforementioned image of a professor in a tweedy blazer standing in front of a chalkboard. But a lot of our job is our research, and a lot of that research (even more so for people working in the sciences) is about project management—grant applications, managing research assistants, organizing conferences. The books and articles and podcasts we make are all the results of years of research—reading and talking and thinking and presenting at conferences and rethinking and rereading and sometimes starting over again because we got the whole thing wrong. But very few of us are doing that research alone in a room surrounded by dusty tomes. We’re mostly just hunched over our keyboards, like everyone else.
