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N3_Project management and Data organization
The discussion topic of this week was mainly on project management and data organization. We got to know about how's and why's of keeping a governance throughout the project duration. We also got some insights on how to organize the research data effectively to avoid hassle towards the end of a project.
Project management is an important part of a successful project. Usually, effective project management is evident in the office setting, however, it is not that much prominent in the academia. The main reason can be the lack of knowledge regarding project management or the lack of understandings of its importance.
Maintaining a governance [i.e. [1] ] from the start of a project can play a significant role in managing a project effectively. The governance should be created as early as possible with the contribution of all the team members and modifications of it might be made as new members join or new situation happens. While this document is not a legal binding, it should clearly specify all the protocols related to responsibilities of each member, the tools and platforms usage throughout the project duration, communication medium, policies if someone breaks any rules, etc,. Other than maintaining a governance, all the members of a project should have specific roles and designations, a detailed data management policy.
From the beginning of the program, I wanted to learn about how I can make my data well organized, what are the best strategies or what are some useful tools. This week they introduced us to 'research object" which is a way to kind of condense everything (data, images, docs) in a single link. Creating a research object at the beginning of the project and updating throughout, reduces a huge burden from us organizing everything at the end. Other than this, some useful tips were shared and software like HackMD, Cryptpad, JupyterBook, MkDocs, etc, were suggested.
Since my graduation, I happened to work in several projects. However, I did not see any of them with project management plan. In one of my projects, when there is a deadline for any submission, I had to go out of my way to complete everything. In another project, I faced a situation where the goal of the project was not made clear among all the graduate students. Everyone had their own thoughts, directions which created a lot of confusions towards the end. When it was time for final report submission, the project PI stopped communicating with the other PIs. From my experience, I could relate, how having a well-defined governance and effective project management policies can make a project successful.
[1] Sahneh, F., Balk, M. A., Kisley, M., Chan, C. K., Fox, M., Nord, B., ... & Merchant, N. (2021). Ten simple rules to cultivate transdisciplinary collaboration in data science. PLoS computational biology, 17(5), e1008879.