Avoiding the Pitfalls of Project Management Posted on September 28, 2007 There are project management details that you can work on between submitting your grant and getting funding, suggests Victoria J. Grochocinski (bio).

There are lots of pitfalls. Some you can anticipate and avoid. Some you can’t. There are always surprises. You offer someone a job. You’re all excited that they’re going to come and at the last minute they take another job, and now you’re back to square one. You have to interview again ‘cause you didn’t find anybody that even remotely came in second. Those are things you can’t avoid.

You do, however, in that time between grant submission and funding, you can do a lot to educate yourself to avoid those pitfalls. Talk to your mentors. They’ve been through it and they know. They may say, “It’s been so long since I’ve done that. Go talk to Jonie. She’s the project coordinator. She’s been here 20 years. She’s been through it all,” and those are valuable people to know within your own group.

I call that triage. I do a lot of triage. People are referred to me often and I don’t know the answer, but I know somebody who’s going to know or be close to who’s going to know. And this is all about how to manage — how to get through the red tape at your university, and every university is different.

So another way to educate yourself and to avoid some of the agony of doing project management is to work on other people’s projects and work on them in a closer way than maybe just being a clinician. Ask questions. “When I fill out that form, what happens to it?” or, “Why am I doing this?” or get more involved. “How does a patient payment work?” Get more involved in those project management issues just to orient yourself to how it works in your clinic or your department, and working on someone else’s project is a very valuable way to acquire some of the knowledge; maybe not the skills, but some of the knowledge, definitely.

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