Projects that Follow None of the Rules
Mike Clayton
Communicator, educator, speaker, and YouTuber focusing on Project Management
- How much will it cost?
- When will you deliver results?
- How will you assure delivery?
These are typical questions that come at the start of a project.
They are also the sort of questions that appear on academic grant applications, where researchers bid for funds.
But some Projects follow None of the Rules...
This week is Nobel Prize week.
- Monday. The 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine went to James Allison and Tasuku Honjo 'for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation'.
- Tuesday. The 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics went to Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou, and Donna Strickland 'for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics'.
- Wednesday. The 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to Frances Arnold 'for the directed evolution of enzymes' and Greg Winter and George P. Smith 'for the phage display of peptides and antibodies'.
- Today should have been Literature day but... sexual harassment allegations. There won't be one this year. And tomorrow is Peace Prize day, followed on Monday by the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
As a former physic researcher, the science prizes always interest me. And it made me wonder...
Did I learn Project Management doing Physics research?
Reflecting, the answer is certainly 'yes, in part'. But I did learn more organizing events for my Students' Union as an undergraduate!
Scientific research is a special type of project environment. Many projects can be defined clearly and planned carefully. But you can't tell what will happen, because, if you could, it wouldn't be research. You need room to diverge from plan, and follow side paths.
Building the equipment you'll use and commissioning it follows familiar project management rules. But, once you start doing science, all bets are off. Indeed, the best results are the ones you wouldn't have - or better still, couldn't have - predicted.
And the big discoveries...
The Nobel-worthy, world-shifting breakthroughs usually come from unexpected directions. Apparently out of nowhere.
Are those scientists lucky?
Yes, of course. But they are lucky because they prepared well, and because they paid attention to things others may not notice.
For the biggest advances, science doesn't follow Project Management rulses. It's more lke an explorer who may have a destination, but is in no hurry to get there. So they can happily spend time wandering and observing... and sometimes seeing something nobody else has ever seen.