Project Management Lessons
What have we learnt so far about project management that would be useful for future collaborations - between us or between others?
- importance of regular communication (obvious, but not overstated)
- skype/teleconf meetings
- hazards and benefits of multiple issuetracker/SVN instances
- local staff not involved in cross-institution communication under-informed
- relationship between project-level (joint) issue tracker and institutional or departmental issue tracker(s)
- issue trackers taking on life of their own and overwhelming actual work completion?
- think about how you're going to handle this stuff before/as you get started (include as a rubric in proposal)
- travel costs: participants' institution pays
- google docs (good or bad?)
- wikis (good or bad?)
- what they mean for the participants
- what they mean for funders
- what they mean for dissemination
- meetings?
- relationship with reporting (report as agenda and minutes)
- newly formed teams could benefit greatly from a "launch" meeting/workshop very early in the performance period
- time-frame
- one-year time frame is very short (too short if you're not already collaborating closely)
- generally, a 3-4 month incubation or ramp-up period (or earlier notification of award) would better allow for putting personnel, systems, contracts in place