It wasn't until he had completed his PhD that Igor Campillo first recognized the importance of effective project management. His salary at the Labein technology centre in Bilbao, Spain, was partly dependent on the funding the group obtained and the efficiency of the project — improving the performance of cement-based materials by studying their nanostructure. In 2003, Campillo was promoted to group leader and had responsibility for a handful of PhD students and lab technicians.

“At that moment, I realized that good project management was essential to make sure we could sustain the group,” recalls Campillo, now director of DeustoTech, a technology initiative at the University of Deusto in Bilbao. But soon after the revelation came the rude awakening: he was ill-prepared to manage a team. Campillo was a researcher first and foremost, not a project leader accustomed to being responsible for a group. “I had to learn very fast to do many things that I wasn't used to,” he says. Only after garnering advice from other project managers and a year of intense on-the-job learning about schedules, budgets and quality assurance — along with a short project-management course offered by his employer — did Campillo feel fully adjusted to his new role.

Campillo's feelings of management inadequacy are not unusual. In the late 1990s, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Chevy Chase, Maryland, started asking alumni of its predoctoral programme how the institute could help to increase the impact of their fellowships. “They all said, 'With respect to science we are fine, but when we accept that first job we're just taking a dive into the unknown. We know nothing about project management,'” says Maryrose Franko, a senior programme officer in graduate science education at the HHMI.

Although many scientists have project-management responsibilities as part of their research activities, others, such as Campillo, leave the lab bench to do it full time. The formal project-manager role has become essential to initiatives within academia, industry and government; it can range from coordinating DNA sequencing to running worldwide clinical trials. Academics often engage in project management informally without realizing it — running simultaneous experiments or applying for grants. Junior faculty members also have project-management roles to fill, creating a vision for their labs and devising research budgets and timelines.

More scientists have started to recognize the need to develop management skills, and have sought resources to succeed in this role in academia and industry, experts say. In either setting, a project is defined as any transient activity that requires time, money, materials and manpower. Projects have a finite lifetime, and must meet certain end points, however uncertain and unpredictable those may be, even in science. Put simply, project management is the process of controlling and organizing limited resources that is required to finish a project as efficiently as possible. And it is not always easy.

Sound planning

Formal project managers often have to take a higher-level view of science. At the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Bethesda, Maryland, for instance, Brad Ozenberger manages the operations of The Cancer Genome Atlas, a massive effort to catalogue genetic mutations responsible for cancer, started by the NHGRI and the National Cancer Institute in 2005. The project involves gathering data from more than a dozen research sites around the country, so Ozenberger must coordinate investigators' research timelines, when and how samples will be processed, and how different data will be integrated. “A lot of my job is making sure that everything is working as it should on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “It may sound easy, but in fact, with a research endeavour such as this, it requires attention almost 24–7.” The people who do best in this type of role are those willing and able to give up some of the intricacies of the work, he adds.

Individual labs need good management too. But many scientists are instead concentrating on advancements in their fields, such as published papers, citations and invited talks. “These researchers are more focused on results than on the process leading to the results,” says Campillo. “But it is important that they learn to appreciate project management as beneficial for research.” Project management allows researchers to make the most of their time, whether keeping staff busy and productive until an important reagent arrives, coming up with alternative experiments if the first one did not go as planned, or applying for grants to ensure the steady flow of funds (see 'Tips for project managers').

Project management in an academic research environment differs from that in industry or government. In academia, managers have less control over the end product, notes Frank Heemskerk, chief operating officer of Research & Innovation Management Services, a management-consultancy company based in Overijse, Belgium. “Although you can and should describe criteria for what the outcome of a project should be, you can't define this in detail as the exact results are unknown — it is research into uncharted territory after all,” he says.

Managing people in an academic setting also often involves a different dynamic. Academic scientists generally need more freedom to operate than do those in other environments — otherwise, says Heemskerk, managers risk stifling the creativity that is essential to succeed. Academics are used to selecting their own research topic, diverting a research programme in a different direction or shifting budgetary monies from hiring staff or buying equipment. For better or worse, scientists in industry and government tend to have more concrete deadlines, better-defined deliverables and, above all, more strict reporting lines.

In both academia and industry, dealing with customers or users of a product or service adds yet another level of complexity, and project managers often have to take on this role. Customers don't always have a clear idea of how to get to their end product — whether it is clinical-trial data analysis or gene-variation data — and managers can help them to define and accomplish realistic goals. “I'm always trying to answer questions and bridge the gap between what customers want to accomplish and what the technology can provide them,” says Ben Boese, a technical project manager for the sequencing service at 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. He notes that the scientists he works with tend to be knowledgeable about their area of biology, but may not understand the significance of sample prep or other aspects of next-generation sequencing.

Management mindset

Project managers in academia and industry often have a science or health-care background. The prevalence of advanced degrees varies within, for example, contract research organizations, drug makers and biotechnology companies. “I don't think people should be limited by their degrees. There is a tremendous amount of on-the-job training and resources,” says René Wheat, director of project management at PPD, a contract research organization based in Wilmington, North Carolina. Wheat, who has a bachelor's degree in health science, says that an internship in a clinical research setting helped her to secure a position at PPD as a clinical research associate. She then worked her way up to becoming a project manager, in part by volunteering to assist project managers at every opportunity.

In the past decade, there has been more interest in project management and more resources available to those wanting to learn, says Stanley Portny, project-management consultant and author of Project Management for Dummies (Wiley Publishing, 2010). Several companies, such as LabVantage, headquartered in East Bridgewater, New Jersey; LabLite in New Milford, Connecticut; and Progeny Software in South Bend, Indiana, offer 'laboratory information management software', which can help scientists to manage schedules, workflows and data. More institutions are offering leadership and project-management courses, experts say.

“We've been pleasantly surprised at the number of institutions that have realized project management is important, and have implemented training,” says Franko, noting that institutions worldwide have requested copies of a project-management manual created by the HHMI. Short courses on leadership and project management, which the HHMI co-sponsors, have evolved from informal lunch discussions to week-long courses, she says. They introduce management tools such as the Gantt chart, which allows managers to create schedules and show the relationships among project tasks.

Not everyone can easily cultivate a project-management mindset, says Portny. He and Heemskerk have noticed that the scientists who view themselves as visionaries or creative types are good at giving a team direction, motivating others and maintaining quality. But the same types often do not feel motivated to chase down deadlines, fill out forms or control budgets. “These scientists would benefit greatly if they get a project manager working in parallel next to them to share the burden of leading larger project teams,” Heemskerk says, adding that this is happening more frequently in the case of larger-infrastructure projects. It is one reason that such scientists — those with a knack for asking questions, clarifying goals, communicating with the right people and motivating others to accept a vision — should find ample opportunities.