Graduate Students and Project Management

A Critical Approach

At the CDH, Project Management Fellowships are attached to specific projects, most of which are proposed by faculty members and chosen as collaborations by the CDH under the auspices of a Research Partnership Grant. Unlike some of our other fellowship opportunities, which run on an open application model, graduate student project managers are typically nominated by the faculty member for their specialist knowledge or based on a previous project. The term of the fellowship is one calendar year, though the fellowship itself is broken into two halves (and two payments) to allow for a midyear assessment of whether all parties involved are happy for the student to continue in this role. To date, all graduate student project managers have been from humanities PhD programs, and only some have come to the position with experience in digital humanities.

A member of the CDH staff serves as the project management mentor. After the graduate student’s nomination, the staff member interviews the graduate student candidate and discusses the responsibilities of the role, ensuring that the candidate is aware of—and excited by—project management as a practice. Faculty motivation for nominating students typically has to do with academic subject awareness; the CDH interview ensures informed consent, and often generates enthusiasm, on the part of the applicant for taking on the administrative side of the role. If all goes well, the graduate student initiates a project manager position with work on the charter.

The charter is a foundational document that describes the rationale, goals, plan of work, resources needed, terms and conditions, and outcomes of a CDH project.3 Charters are written by core members of a project team in a series of approximately five meetings occurring over the course of a month. The planning process is intensive and collaborative and requires substantial input from everyone on a team. Charters serve as formalized agreements among all team members on such crucial questions as scope, technical design, infrastructural needs, and success criteria. The charter process is the team’s first opportunity to establish a team ethos as well as infrastructure to sustain the project over its life cycle. The graduate student project manager shadows their CDH mentor and helps run this series of crucial meetings.

At the same time, the project manager attends a multiday orientation also attended by graduate students working on other CDH projects. This is the first opportunity to create community and connection and where key concepts, themes, and problems are introduced to the cohort of new project managers. Discussions continue throughout the year in the project managers group, which meets monthly. Coordinated by a CDH mentor who assigns short readings and structured discussion topics, the project managers group is the primary space in which disciplinary self-reflection occurs and where project managers can ask questions and candidly share the challenges they face. The number of graduate student project managers at any given time varies because it is linked to the number of active CDH projects. We also open this group to CDH postdoctoral fellows, who attend as mentors, because they are established digital humanities researchers, and as students, because they want to learn more about project management as a discipline.

We are acutely aware that what falls under the term “project management” is often seen as the necessary busy work that is adjacent to the “real” academic endeavors of research or to the creative technical work of software development. Furthermore, the emotional labor involved in negotiating the various unequal power structures in which all academic projects take place—power structures in which graduate students typically occupy the lowest position—results in an enormous amount of unrecognized, invisible labor. In our documentation and labor practices, we empower graduate project managers to value and trust their own instincts while recognizing that raising difficult questions with faculty leads, who are often their dissertation directors as well, may be impractical. The CDH project management mentor and the peers in the cohort are key resources for negotiating this difficult emotional territory. The CDH mentor may, when necessary, escalate issues to the faculty member or serve as the mediator between team members.

The project managers group is where students are first introduced to the concept of critical project management. It is not always clear to students, or even to many established digital humanities researchers, that by becoming a project manager they enter a new field of study with its own literature, practices, and debates. This is often obscured by the highly functionalist application of project management in today’s corporate and industry settings. Even though project management is recognized as central to the success of DH projects, especially those that are larger-scale or multi-institutional, there has been little evolution in the way the digital humanities community frames project management guidance and practice.4 Although many resources are truly helpful in aiding scholars through the project life cycle, they tend to cast project management as little more than a set of best practices, templates, and tools; put simply, project management is viewed as not much more than the necessary scaffolding for efficiency and success.5 And because of this focus on control and outcomes, project management can easily be undervalued, misunderstood, or blamed for project failures. The project manager is frequently isolated as the sole individual responsible for project organization and administration—bureaucratic work considered beyond the scope of the team as a collective. At its most cynical, project management practices are viewed disdainfully as managerial technologies that prove corporate culture’s encroachment into higher education.

Seeking a corrective, we follow the Critical Project Studies movement led by organizational studies scholars Svetlana Cicmil and Damian Hodgson, who urge a reorientation toward the intellectual foundations of project management and the deep social and contextual nature of projects.6 Bringing project management into dialogue with Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, Cicmil and Hodgson remind us that because projects are “social phenomena that are not neutral, but socially constructed in the interactions among people,” managing them entails navigating complex social and cultural forces (“Introduction,” 15). They give the project manager, and the project team more generally, agency as cocreators in the project reality. For Cicmil and Hodgson, the urge to universalize project management through standardized terminology, tools, and metrics decontextualizes and even dehumanizes a project by shutting down alternative visions or trajectories and a multiplicity of voices (13). A flattened view of project management can have ethical implications as well. Because projects both perform and inscribe the power asymmetries present in our societies, the project managers must show awareness of—and when necessary and possible create alternatives to—models in which tools are used unreflectively for observation, measure, and control. We agree with Cicmil and Hodgson’s position that project success must be defined beyond just time, cost, and quality performance to include aspects such as the environment, health and safety, and ethics, which imposes a more human-centered or humanistic orientation to the overall project.

Introducing this critical approach to novice project managers creates a powerful foundation that helps graduate students link the theoretical and practical, the humanistic and the technical, and the individual and the collective. This conceptual starting point empowers the project managers by raising their understanding of the complexity and impact of their roles, and it fosters an environment of equity and respect on the project team from the start.

Process

As suggested above, the critical approach to project management informs the way that graduate students learn about the tools, workflows, and systems that are part of digital humanities work. Among the most valuable experiences they gain through their project management fellowship is close involvement with our software development team. They become familiar with our process, designed by our lead developer and iteratively modified in collaboration with members of the development and design team. The term “process” in software engineering refers to the set of work phases applied to designing and building a software product and encompasses the workflows, systems, and tools and how they connect and relate to each other.

At the CDH, graduate students are exposed to Agile software development in action and see the value of clear articulation of methods, steps, and goals. They learn the value of team planning, iteration, and retrospectives. They create workflows for collaborative tasks such as transcribing letters or tagging images. The importance of a documentation strategy when working with teams quickly becomes clear to project managers, who can apply this experience to any collaborative endeavor. Graduate student project managers also gain significant experience in the technical aspects of the project. They participate in the design and development process by writing user stories, testing features, and performing user experience testing. They manage and track complex workflows that span scholarly, technical, and social priorities. They become fluent in the approaches employed by the development and design team and serve as translators of the project’s technical aspects to the broader community of peers and scholars.

We also aim for graduate student project managers to see process from an epistemological angle. Borrowing ideas developed by economic geographers Gernot Grabher and Oliver Ibert, we discuss how tools, workflows, and systems help constitute the “project ecology,” the relational space and site of exchanges that enable the articulation of new knowledge. In “Project Ecologies: A Contextual View on Temporary Organizations,” Grabher and Ibert provide useful notions of “cumulative” and “disruptive” project ecologies: cumulative projects are typified by corporate software development teams where modularization and easy replicability are key, whereas disruptive project ecologies are “organized around the imperative of originality,” as in many academic environments (178). Because the digital humanities project ecology is the space in which the modular, iterative mode meets with the disruptive ecology of creativity-driven professions, it is particularly important to recognize how a project management process must be able to adapt to this dynamic knowledge-building environment.

By focusing on process as essential to knowledge production, graduate students are taught to make their choices transparent and how to balance planning, implementation, iteration, and reflection. This is a practice that can be broadly generalized and applied in other collaborative endeavors or in independent research such as dissertation writing.

Contingency

One of the main lessons learned in project management for digital humanities is to accept uncertainty—to imagine and be prepared for multiple outcomes. At the same time that much of a project manager’s task revolves around keeping the organizational structure intact, we push back against an overemphasis on what is known as the “iron triangle” of project management: budget, scope, and schedule. Openness to course correction is a key aspect of our approach. In digital humanities, project management must be a dialectical process, demanding that its practitioner toggle between the real and the preferable and balance the ideal with the pragmatic. In the early years of CDH project development, when our approach was more “waterfall,” each charter for our year-long grants would include elaborate work plans and timelines and Gantt charts. And each year, we struggled to reach deadlines and milestones and often felt disappointment (shared by our faculty collaborators) that we could not reach the goals we set out to accomplish.

Our failures to stay “on track” were not due to incompetence or negligence. Nearly every time we “fell behind,” it was due to unexpected scholarly or technical discoveries that forced us to reorient our thinking. This is the precise nature of digital humanities work; the material we work with is far more complex, interesting, and unexpected than we imagine at the outset. Our goal is not only to complete a particular deliverable but to explore and learn and cocreate something new. As important as it is to stay within scope and budget and to respect timelines, it is just as important to establish an ethos of collective flexibility based on intellectual goals coupled with the project team’s social and ethical priorities.

In the CDH’s latest iteration of project charters, we have eschewed timelines and work plans for a more agile approach.7 We now provide a “road map,” which assigns some chronological guidelines to major milestones, but we have built in time and space for uncertainty and modification. The project manager must learn to balance keeping a team on track, bound to certain time and resource constraints, with the need to discern and accept new directions.

This acknowledgment of multiple paths and undiscovered outcomes must be the approach that today’s graduate students in the humanities navigate through their own learning and career paths. The pressure to complete the PhD and to succeed in an ever more competitive and diminishing job market means that young scholars must practice the kind of awareness and honest self-reflection that can accept, or even embrace, new alternatives.

Collaboration

Project management is intrinsically tied to the central innovation of digital humanities, which is the collaborative partnerships among interdisciplinary and cross-professional teams of professors, graduate students, undergraduates, librarians, developers, designers, and communications professionals. Digital humanities practitioners know that establishing a truly collaborative environment among such diverse teams is a challenge. The structures of academia have, by and large, not yet changed in ways that validate and recognize collaborative research in the humanities as scholarship.8 Bringing together teams surfaces the complex labor landscape that operates in academia, which includes the balance of power between tenured and junior or contingent faculty, the divide between “service”-oriented academic professions versus those dedicated to research, the absence of consistent guidelines for attribution and compensation of student labor, and the role of institutional support from university administration.

At the CDH, we create project charters that model collaboration. The charter engenders a dialogic environment that we view not primarily as a contract or formalization of outcomes and responsibilities, although these are included, but as an active space where project members create a team dynamic with a shared commitment to intellectual, ethical, social, and sometimes political values. By articulating the project’s commitment to a set of values, charters thus necessitate the negotiation of such topics as equity and fair labor, accountability, adaptability, accessibility, sustainability, and community practices. Charters are continuously referred to throughout the project life cycle and amended as necessary to document major changes, one way that charters acknowledge the constant renegotiation of outcomes that characterizes digital humanities work.

The emphasis on discussion and revision allows for the incorporation of many voices and creates a cohesive network of relationships among newly assembled project team members. We see this as a key ethical intervention of the CDH project process, which helps transform and enable, however subtly, new intellectual, social, and cultural dynamics to take root in the academic context.

The foundations and practices of a relational model for project management have, in our experience, led to successful projects and successful graduate students who have found careers both in and beyond academia. We are committed to working with graduate students to reflect critically and define success broadly; not all of our graduate student project managers practice “digital humanities” in their scholarship even in its broadest sense, but they all understand, intimately, how these projects work. When knowledge is itself an outcome, the imperative exists to develop a process that allows for flexibility and uncertainty; this is a subtle way we aim to make the CDH a space of discovery and community for graduate students across the university. No academic work happens in a vacuum. We want our students to foreground the relationships and institutional structures that influence their work, along with their ethical implications. By rethinking project management for digital humanities with our graduate student fellows, we have arrived at a theoretical perspective better suited to the spirit of humanist inquiry to which we are all committed.

Notes

1. 1. In her “Curatorial Statement,” included in the MLA Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities guide, Siemens explains, “With its associated methods, tools, and techniques, project management provides a way to coordinate people, tasks and resources.” Siemens further adopts the Association for Project Management’s definition of project management: “Simply stated, though complicated in practice, project management is ‘the application of processes, methods, knowledge, skills and experience to achieve the project objectives.’” See Siemens, “Curatorial Statement.”

2. 2. For information about the CDH Project Management Fellowship program, see https://cdh.princeton.edu/engage/graduate-students/project-management-fellowship/.

3. 3. For information on the charter process and published CDH project, see https://cdh.princeton.edu/research/project-management/charters/.

4. 4. Useful project management workshops and “how to” trainings are offered regularly at summer digital humanities institutes, such as the University of Victoria’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), the European Summer School at Leipzig, and the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching. Panels at digital humanities conferences have been a welcome space for more creative and critical approaches to project management; see especially Ermolaev et al., “Project Management for the Digital Humanities” and the Project Management in the Humanities conferences at DHSI.

5. 5. The most useful and comprehensive resource for hands-on project management in digital humanities remains DevDH, available at https://devdh.org/ and created in 2013 by Jennifer Guiliano of Indiana University Indianapolis (IU Indianapolis) and Simon Appleford of Creighton University. Another excellent resource is the Project Management collection curated by Siemens for MLA’s 2020 Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments. For resources aimed specifically at graduate students, see Storti and Lestock, “Project Management.”

6. 6. In particular, see the volume of essays edited by Cicmil and Hodgson, Making Projects Critical.

7. 7. CDH charters and charter process were revised in summer 2020.

8. 8. As Grabher and Ibert define disruptive project ecologies, the entrenchment of distinct professional personae means that “interactions within the team are, comparatively speaking, more strongly shaped by antagonistic professional identities than by the joint project task.” See Grabher and Ibert, “Project Ecologies,” 180.

Bibliography

1. Cicmil, Svetlana, and Damian Hodgson. “Introduction.” In Making Projects Critical, edited by Damian Hodgson and Svetlana Cicmil, 1–21. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
2. Ermolaev, Natalia, Rebecca Munson, Xinyi Li, Lynne Siemens, Ray Siemens, Micki Kaufman and Jason Boyd. “Project Management for the Digital Humanities.” Panel presented at DH 2018, Mexico City, June 21, 2018. https://dh2018.adho.org/en/project-management-for-the-digital-humanities/.
3. Grabher, Gernot, and Oliver Ibert. “Project Ecologies: A Contextual View on Temporary Organizations.” In The Oxford Handbook of Project Management, edited by Peter W. G. Morris, Jeff Pinto, and Jonas Söderlund, 175–98. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
4. Hodgson, Damian, and Svetlana Cicmil, eds. Making Projects Critical. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
5. Siemens, Lynne. “Curatorial Statement.” Humanities Commons. Accessed February 15, 2022. https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/Project-Management.
6. Storti, Sarah, and Brooke Lestock. “Project Management.” Praxis Program, Scholars’ Lab. Accessed February 15, 2022. http://praxis.scholarslab.org/resources/project-management/.