Project Management

I had lunch yesterday with a colleague who had just downloaded new project management software to keep track of the work on his various grants/contracts/projects and to keep track of the work his various people are doing for these projects. I can only imagine that he is in Gant Chart Bliss about now. Everything is organized and all of his students, postdocs, and research scientists are accounted for. Life will be beautiful for him for a while. Until he gets bogged down with all of the things he has to do, and he realizes that he didn’t have time to add a time management upkeep task to his life. The charts will go unmaintained for a few months and everything will be out of date when he gets back to it. He will then have to start over, recreating the entire project management structure again. Bliss will not be a word that he will use to describe this situation. No, he will most likely be in Gant Chart Hell.

Well, at least that’s my prediction for what will happen by this summer. For me, I am not ready for project management software. I have a small enough group that I can keep track of it in my head, for the most part. Yes, I have a calendar that is rather full, and I am very glad that my computer beeps at me to tell me when I am supposed to be doing some things. I am also fortunate enough to receive reminder emails about project progress reports and other management tasks that I have to deal with occasionally. But, as for what should be getting done on the specific grants and projects, I don’t try to over manage it all. Perhaps this isn’t the best option, but people in my team of researchers seem to stay motivated and get stuff done, and things seem to be moving forward at a reasonable pace on most of the projects. I am sure that some could go faster if I were a harder nosed manager with those people, but so far I am willing to allow that slack in the system so that I don’t have to resort to project management software. I don’t want to be sentenced to Gant Chart Hell. That just doesn’t sound fun to me. At least not yet.

Writing

I love to write, but lately I have not had the chance to really complete a manuscript. Other things just seem to get in the way, and the few hours I occasionally spend on a paper isn't enough to bring one to fruition. This is something I don't like about my job: I like so many things about it that spending time on one thing means not doing something else I actually like to do.

Last week I was at a meeting, and a colleague reminded me that I had missed the deadline for a journal special issue. I was very sad, and a bit frustrated, that I had let this slip. He then said that if I can get him a manuscript by December 23, he would include it in the bundle he is sending off to the journal (apparently this journal wants all of the papers for the special issue at the same time). Tuesday night I started converting my Powerpoint slides into a paper outline. I flew home from the meeting on Wednesday, continuing to work on the text on the plane. Thursday I finished my final exam preparations and dove back into writing. Friday I gave my exam, continued writing, and sometime past 5 pm sent out an email to my potential coauthors with a completed (but still a bit rough) manuscript of the study.

I am glad that I have not lost my mo-jo for writing, and that I can crank out a paper in less than a week, given that I completely ignore everything else that I am supposed to be doing.

Today I got an email from my colleague: he had a number of people at the meeting ask him for an extension, so he talked with the journal and the new deadline is January 22. I have time to revise. Ahh. Life is good.

Allocating TAships

Prof-Like Substance has a good post (here) on how his department allocates teaching assistantships to PhD students.  His department is similar to mine: using TAships as buffer/bridge funding when grant-funded research assistantships temporarily dry up for an existing PhD student.  We rarely give them to first-year PhD students, and instead only take new PhD students if a faculty is willing and able to “promise” funding for the expected 5-year dissertation timeline.  We are still in that happy naive state, however, of not enough PhD students needing TAships compared to the available slots.  So some of the TAships  usually go to the Master’s students, who almost never get funding otherwise.

PLS has emerged from this state and his department is now struggling with how to allocate TAships when there are more PhD students needing such slots than the openings available. In particular, PLS raises the question of what to do when a faculty member with little or no research funding/projects asks for a TA slot. These are actually 2 separate (but related) issues.

For me, I see two clear priorities for TA positions.  The first and foremost is this:  existing students whose professor has been unlucky renewing the grant that’s funding the student.  Most grants are 2-4 years long, yet the PhD timeline (in my field) averages 5 years.  We expect the faculty member to fund the student for all of the years of the student’s PhD, but the faculty makes this promise without actually having the out-year funding in hand.  So, it is very easy to see the need for bridging funds in such a situation.  These cases, in my opinion, should get first priority.

The second use of TAships should be to help untenured faculty build their group.  It’s hard to get grants, especially without a proven track record of productivity with grant funding.  Much is asked of new Assistant Professors, and making them sweat about not graduating enough PhD students before tenure review is not helpful.  If, after the first priority students are taken care of, there are still open slots, then the junior faculty should be asked if they would like to take on a new student or even have an existing student TA for a term (to stretch out their start-up or grant funding).  This is tricky, though, because the junior faculty also wants scientific productivity out of their PhD students, and TAing often slows this down.  But, that’s a choice the Assistant Professor should make (in consultation with a senior faculty mentor) to balance their resources.

After this the prioritization gets fuzzy for me, but here are two other criteria that might come into play.

Existing PhD students who simply want the experience of teaching.  Some grad students (like me, way back when) were continually on RAships and never had to teach as a grad student.  I didn’t really know it was an option, and I doubt I would have taken it anyway.  I wanted to get through quickly.  Others, though, want that experience, and should be allowed to do it, if their advisor doesn’t veto it.  In fact, I am not even sure that I would want the research advisor able to veto such a request.

New PhD students for highly productive faculty.  This seems backwards, but I believe in the saying that “to those who have much, more will be given.”  That is, I think that such faculty have proven themselves able to handle multiple grad students and lead them through to successful dissertations, usually with ample funding throughout for all of their students.  However, sometimes such a faculty wants a new student to start a new project or to continue an existing project for which the current student is about to finish.  The promise of funding is there and real, but just not in place that first semester or year (while proposals are written and/or senior students finish up).  This is a low-risk situation, and the department is usually well served by such a TAship.

As for the deadwood faculty asking for a TAship, the chair or grad director needs to speak frankly with them.  I would not rank this faculty high on my priority list for getting a TA slot.  Not only would it be a new PhD student position but also there is no recent track record of successfully advising (let along funding) a student through completion.  Such a position would be high risk for the department and the student.  I would have serious reservations about making such an assignment.  That said, I am not totally against such a faculty getting a TA slot, for a term or two, with the expectation of copious proposal writing and the threat of losing the student to another faculty if funding does not materialize.  I would also ask the grad director to regularly check with the student to make sure that things are going well, and intervene if they are not.

 In summary, vague rules need to be drafted and adopted and a TAship czar needs to be appointed, one who will make the unfair decision regarding which students get this slots.  This decision cannot be done by committee.

Bad Advisors

To go along with the “how many grad students” question from the last post, there is a discussion on FSP’s blog about Bad Advisors (BAs). I hope that I am not a BA.  I hope that just being aware that there is such a thing as good and bad advising is half the struggle to avoiding the BA label.  I might be an unintentionally bad advisor (UBA) for some of my students.  I don’t know.  I try to err on the side of over-advising, sometimes at the expense of my own first-author publication production.  This summer has not been good for paper writing, but I have been helping others get out papers and proposals.  I did get to code for a while this summer, and that was fun.  I don’t think I could do this with 10+ PhD students at once, or even 5 grad students.  I would have no time for myself and my own pursuits.  I think that I would be in constant manager mode and wouldn’t get to actually do any science directly.  It would all be vicariously through my employees.  That’s not what I want to do, though.  I am still very interested in coding and making plots and spending time with a problem, and I don’t want to simply be one who gets the money for others to able to do these things.  So, I will not grow my group too fast.  For one, that takes a lot of money, but for another, I want to be able to (very slowly) transition into the permanent manager position.  I am pretty happy with the state of things right now, although I would have liked to have had more time this summer to write a paper or two.  But, I do not regret my time advising others.  This is productive time for me, just in a different direction, and I am not bitter about it.  Just a little nostalgic for the days when I did everything myself.  No, not really.

How Many Grad Students?

I have 3 graduate students working for me right now.  I find this to be enough, along with the undergraduate students I advise on projects (usually 1 or 2 at any time), other faculty I collaborate with, and post-docs or research scientists that I support and/or work with around here. There are a few faculty in my department who have 5 or 6 PhD students at a time.  I am not sure I want that many people reporting to me and looking to me for direction and mentoring.  I know of a few in our field who claim to have 10-20 graduate students in their group.  I don’t see how this is humanly possible.  In fact, I don’t see how that is even remotely responsible. 

 

To me, having more than 5 PhD students, let alone 10 or 20, is irresponsible on several levels. It means that the faculty member is continuously in meetings with these people (assuming that they have regular interaction with each student).  This cheats the faculty out of time to do their own research investigations, and they are probably giving up all home life in order to publish the first-author papers that I see from them.  It also means that the students don’t get very much one-on-one time with their advisor.  Perhaps this is fine for some students, but I have found that most PhD students like regular interaction with their advisors.  In the early years, they like it so that they learn the field and discover a research project that suits them well.  In the later years, they like it because they have results and need to show them to someone and get feedback.  It is also not good for the field, because such a faculty member is replicating themselves (well, at least producing new PhDs in the field), which increases the pressure on the already over-subscribed traditional funding sources for the field.  It is probably only acceptable to have so many PhD students if you know that most of your students will leave the field and not pursue research careers.  In this case, under-advising and over-producing them is fine.  But, even still, for the few grad students in your group who want to continue as a researcher in the field, life in a huge group might not be the optimal situation.

 

I will probably have a student graduate this year, and I will probably take a new PhD student next fall.  Somewhere between 2 and 4 grad students seems like a good number for me.

Pittsburgh Day 5: Going Global

Today, I heard the leader of the Stephen Ministries organization, Ken Haugk, say that they are very close to unveiling a “whole church leadership system," analogous to the Stephen Ministry leadership and management system that I have been learning about all week. This is truly fantastic, as I think that this system is universally applicable to any management situation (see Day 2 post below). I think I might quit my tenured faculty job and go to work for Stephen Ministries to help them develop a “whole scientist leadership system." I did not receive any leadership or management training when I became a professor, or a research scientist, or whenever it was that I had to start writing proposals and funding myself and hiring grad students and building a group. I know that our department offers nothing like this for any of our junior faculty, tenure-track or research-track. While I am not actually serious about quitting my job, I am serious about developing a leadership and management toolkit for scientists...unless someone can tell me where such a thing already exists.

Pittsburgh Day 3: Leadership Training

This is one of the few meetings I’ve attended where I come back from the sessions more energized than when I went down in the morning. This stuff is great.

I have this nagging fear that I will forget it all when I get back to reality next week, and that the excitement I have for implementing good management practices will fade away and I will simply continue on with how I am doing things now. Actually, I am not that far off from the system they are presenting this week, except perhaps on the planning stages. I think I do a pretty good job with defining tasks to achieve near-term goals (vision and strategy) and pretty good at supervising and mentoring those in my group. Where I need help is in the long-term thinking section of the master plan: defining core values, defining a mission/purpose, and assessing progress against such universal principles. In short, I think I am becoming a good manager, but I have not yet become a good leader.

Pittsburgh Day 2: Management Training

I am enjoying this Stephen Leader Training Course. It’s basically an intensive bombardment of information and activities on how to lead a church program, specifically a Stephen Ministry program. They seem to have taken fundamental management practices and put a Christian twist on them. It’s very nice for me, as I am essentially a manager at work and have never had a formal managerial training course like this. While the day was long without much time for wandering my thoughts to other topics, I’m taking some time this evening to reflect on how the day’s lessons could be applied to my work environment.

The 10 steps in the system:
-- Leadership: picking the right team to lead the program. For work, this is me, but should I expand into a scientific empire, then I need to pick the right people to lead with me.
-- Vision: I should create a long-range, in some sense unattainable, vision statement for myself and my research team, then keep this on my mind as I do everything else I do as a professor.
-- Awareness: I need to publicize my work in multiple ways so that (a) other researchers know what I’m doing and (b) potential students/hires will know what I’m doing.
-- Recruit: I need to actively and conscientiously pursue the best students and potential hires for my group.
-- Train: I need to have a plan for training new students and group members, and then diligently implement that plan. I can see that this will be a hard one to follow, because doing science is an inexact science, but I think I should come up with a general philosophy about training, at the very least.
-- Commission: graduation of undergrads and grad students? Promotion of research scientists?
-- Referrals: not the best translation, as this is Stephen Ministry specific, but I think it means, for my work life, getting my students directed toward the proper project for each one of them, and thinking seriously about these assignments.
-- Supervise: I should regularly meet with them, as a group, to provide affirmation of their accomplishments, support for their ongoing endeavors, and constructive feedback on areas where improvement is needed.
-- Affirm: this is not only part of the last one (affirmation during supervision), but also affirmation in other venues, especially public ones, like promoting my students to other researchers while at meetings.
-- Evaluate: I don’t think I want to implement a periodic evaluation of my students and group members, but I do think that I should occasionally think critically about how things are going, especially with regard to the vision/plan mentioned above.

They give advice and examples on how to do each of these steps. While their material is all slanted towards Stephen Ministry, I can easily see how it is universally applicable to whatever program you are leading and/or managing. So, this is going to be a good week.

Still not much progress on my funding proposal for the military. I will spend time on that now. More tomorrow.

Manager Mode

I just submitted a proposal to NASA, as did one of the research scientists that I support. They will be reviewed by the same subpanel of the same program, and will be ranked relative to each other when the final funding decisions are made by the NASA HQ discipline scientist. It’s kind of weird directly competing with another proposal not only from the same department but also from the same group.

This brings me to the concept of “manager mode.” Three years ago, when I was research faculty instead of instructional faculty, I had time to write my own code, do my own simulations, analyze my own data, compare my own model results with the data, and write my own papers. I cannot do this now. The teaching and service loads of an instructional faculty (now tenured, as of 2 months ago!) greatly limit the time I have to do any of those things. Plus, I am expected to maintain a research group. I think I have done pretty well creating one. Three years ago it was me and 2 grad students. Now it is me, 2 assistant research scientists, 4 grad students, and 1-3 undergrad students (2 this summer). Funding all of these people is a major priority in my life and so writing proposals is a constant activity. Proposals usually have hard deadlines, so these often take precedence over everything else for a week or two when such a deadline comes up. Meeting with all of these people is a major time commitment as well. The undergrads need a few minutes (perhaps an hour) every day, the grad students and research scientists a few hours once or twice a week. Between proposals and managing the people in my group, most of my time allocation for research activities is spent. Another chunk of time is spent in peer review. Whereas I used to say yes to every request, I often say no to paper reviews not, not doing more than one every month or two. Proposal reviews I do every time, though, and this takes some effort to do it right. Another chunk of my research time allocation is spent at conferences, which takes away a whole week every now and then.

All of this leaves very little time for me to do my own research. That’s especially true during the school year, when the constant deadline of the next lecture or homework set posting is usually just a day away (and the various departmental committees are active). During the summer months, I now look forward to getting something done. Last summer I wrote 2 first-author papers. The summer before...2 papers. This summer...nothing so far. It’s July 9th; I have less than 2 months to get stuff done. Luckily, this week and next are now fairly open, and I hope to spend a lot of time making plots and writing text.

Do I like “manager mode”? Yes. I like teaching, and that is essentially what I am doing with both my students and my research scientists. My publication rate is actually higher now than before, counting all of the coauthorships on manuscripts. But, that said, yesterday afternoon was very satisfying: I spent it writing code, running the model, and making plots. Today...compare those results with data. Life is good.

Former Students and Code Usage

The steps:

1) I hire grad student to work on a project.

2) Grad student writes a program to do the work.

3) Grad student publishes some papers and the grant is completed.

4) Grad student defends dissertation gets PhD.

5) Grad student gets a job elsewhere.

6) I keep a version of the code.

7) I write a proposal to do something new with the code.

8) Grad student gets mad that I am using “his” code without permission from him or funding for him.

Has anyone else had a familiar experience?

My first response is to tell him to get over it. I paid for the code development and mentored him on the science behind the necessity of the code. My second response, because I want to help him out, is to offer to include him on whatever papers I/my new grad student writes with results from the code. My third response is to actually offer him a subcontract to pay him to help continue developing the code. My fourth response it to totally ignore his unhappiness and continue as if I had never received his email.