One of the things I love about Oxford is the way it pushes you to become a well-rounded person. It does so by means of a wealth of talks and lectures, and also through the college system that encourages meeting people from different disciplines, but above all through the strong culture of student projects. This place will encourage you, perhaps even push you, to take part in fantastic projects that will make the already very demanding workload even worse… but also teach you incredible skills and get you to work with wonderful, inspiring people.
Last year I got involved in the Green Templeton (my college) Summer Ball as Project Manager. For the newcomers, an Oxford Ball is a high-end lavish party organised by students which lasts for a long number of hours and includes everything you could possibly imagine – usually unlimited food and drinks, as well as a variety of musical and non-musical entertainment. There is a wide range of prices between 50 pounds and as much as 300 (especially in the other place), and as could not be otherwise, it involves dressing up fancy.
Picture of the Radcliffe Observatory, landmark of Green Templeton College, lit up during the 2019 Summer Ball. I may or may have not felt very emotional when the lights turned off and 9 months of work came to an end.
As you can imagine, organising this large scale event took a lot of effort. We undertook all the tasks to set up the ball from scratch, including designing the event, negotiating and signing contracts, marketing and selling the tickets, and many other things that it would be very boring to relate (can you imagine the amount of paperwork I had to go through?). All of this was done by a group of 14 postgraduate students working very hard for approximately nine months of work. And somehow we succeeded and delivered a fantastic event that lasted 10 hours and entertained more than 400 people.
Thanks to the nine months spent playing a leading role in such a large endeavour, I feel that my project management skills have been very significantly increased. Fortunately, many of these skills can be directly transferred to the other big project that I managed last year, and that also fortunately will still be with me for another couple of years: my doctoral research. In this blog post I would like to outline five things that I learned doing project management for an Oxford ball that I think are directly transferable to doing a PhD.
(1) Changing decisions has a high cost. I have lost count of the hours I spent looking at the map of the ball last year. We altered the locations of different events so many times that, by the time we were actually setting up, every member of the team could tell you a different permutation. Needless to say, this was very inefficient and created a lot of clashes: we put so much effort in creating the “perfect” distribution, that we ended up not having a distribution at all!
This is not to suggest that you should not alter your decisions – it means that you should have a good reason to make changes, especially when several people are involved! This is especially import in the kind of interdisciplinary research we do at OPIG, where several PIs are often involved. Any unjustified changes to your experiment or project will make updating everyone more difficult, and limit their engagement and contribution. Make sure you gather enough information before taking an important decision, and remember that it is often better to have something suboptimal that works than an inexistent perfect solution.
(2) Focus on the priorities. As Ball committee, we had perhaps one only handicap: Green Templeton is a small, young college that could give us no more resources than their site and some help from the staff. Despite our economic limitations, we still managed to put together an event that (feel my pride as I write this sentence) could compete with similar balls at other, richer colleges with more resources. There is a reason behind this: being aware of our limited resources, we focused on the things that really mattered. Although we did not have a fancy helter skelter or fireworks that would have added little to the experience, we made sure we would not run out of food or drinks, and secured a fantastic entertainment line-up that kept everyone happy all night.
I cannot stress the importance of this advice. In any real-life project, resources will always be limited, be it money as in this ball, or time as in any PhD project. Whenever you need to design a plan, you should first ask one key question: what is it that you want to achieve? Make sure to eliminate any unimportant factors, and when you have a clear list of what you would expect to have if your project is successful, go all in and make sure you achieve them as soon as possible.
(3) Always ask for advice. Every project is unique, but most projects are similar to other projects; there has only been and there will only be one GTC Summer Ball 2019, but there are innumerable other event projects. One of the things I found most useful was talking to people that have been working on events for a long time, and politely asking for help. Perhaps to my surprise, I found that most people genuinely wanted to help, and that gave me very valuable advice.
There will always be someone you can ask for some advice. It might be a postdoc or senior PhD student in your lab, or your advisor, or someone at your college. Even in the almost unbelievable case that you don’t know anyone else, there will always be a way to contact someone, somehow – after all, we live in the Internet era now.
On a side note – and this is perhaps a general note on all aspects of life -, you will find that the most valuable advice is often the most obvious one. I think it probably takes a long time to find how important (and how rarely followed) is the advice that everyone considers obvious. Make sure to listen to that kind of advice and apply it as effectively as you can.
(4) Have a contingency plan. There is one universal rule about projects, and that is, you will always find unexpected problems. Having unanticipated complications is not necessarily a failure, but failing to anticipate the unexpected is certainly a big one. You should reserve a fraction of your resources in case something goes wrong. In large scale projects there are certainly techniques to develop contingency plans, but in the context of a PhD, it can all be summarised in a popular maxim: underpromise and overdeliver.
There is a hidden bonus to this, and it is when the unexpected problems are so small that you don’t need to actually use all your contingency resources. And, like myself in the week before the ball, you will be able to order 20 kg of brownies to increase your food supply. Or, in the case of a PhD, take a few days off (oh, no, I have never done this…).
(5) Establish boundaries. The good and bad thing of large projects is, they will absorb you and end up being in your mind all the time. This can be a source of fantastic feelings when it works (when you finally manage to do that experiment, or when you negotiate a contract at half the price you expected), but also drag you completely when things are not working out. In the last case, you need to find a way to protect yourself and your other projects.
As simple as it might sound, I have found this to be the most challenging piece of advice. I am a passionate person and I enjoy putting all of myself into the projects that I am running, academic or not – I simply find it difficult to stop working. I have found that the best way to apply this advice is to leave your laptop home, turn on the airplane mode in your phone and have some meaningful rest. Go and watch a play, spend some quality time with your friends or/and partner, and if you can, get away from your city. Above all and by all means, do not feel guilty. The best thing you can do is to make sure that you are in full physical and mental health to work on your project.
Learning to manage projects is perhaps one of the most important skills you could ever learn. After all, no matter how good your other skills are: you will eventually need to put them to work and collaborate with other people. There is a lot to learn, but I have found that the best way to learn is to deliver projects and reflect what went wrong. In this case, you might take advice from Warren Buffett: It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes. I hope this was as useful to you as it has been for me!
