On the difference between academic projects that move forward & those that slow to a standstill.
Keeping the momentum up on research projects is tricky.
Usually, projects kick off with every team member promising to deliver intellectual products, participate on calls, & help polish the paper.
Often, as a project progresses, team members' enthusiasm wanes - the start of the semester, people don't get along, or life event occurs.
Eventually, if you are not careful, you end up with a project with a lot of sunk costs but not a lot of forward momentum.
We have all suffered through a few of these projects.
The worst-case projects progress beyond data collection, even to the point of a full paper being written, & the team simply loses interest is seeing the paper to publication.
I have one project, where remains one author emails every week or two - what's next? No one responds. As the last author, I can't make anyone work. So, I die a little each time I receive that email.
In another project, I email every few months asking - can we simply wrap this up & put it under review? I am frustrated every time that I think about the three datasets sitting idly in the cloud.
In my successful projects, we somehow avoid the project doldrums and push through to journal submission. We never lose momentum.
What do some projects keep momentum? & others slow to a standstill?
After some thought, I've reached a few conclusions.
Research projects that maintain momentum tend to
(1) have an emotional leader.
That leader can be anyone on the team. They have to have time to care about the project.
On my most fun projects PhD students often serve as emotional leaders - motivating the faculty to stay engaged & encouraging people to provide rapid feedback.
(2) have a shared vision.
Every team member understands the goal of the project. This makes it easier to define deliverables & define progress.
(3) have shared metrics for performance.
Knowing that work gets work done keeps people engaged in what are often multi-year efforts.
On my successful teams, we have tacit benchmarks that we work towards - defining ideas, measuring ideas, gathering data.
If, after several weeks, we have not progressed on any of these fronts, a project is at risk of stalling.
(4) tend to deal with practically important problems.
Every team member can see the value of doing the research.
When you can't see your work's potential to change the world, it is hard to stay motivated.
(5) have stopping points.
Projects should not last forever.
Projects need clearly defined end goals - be it adding knowledge, a conference presentation or a journal publication.
Absent a clearly defined stopping point, I have found that I tend to lose interest (& so do my collaborators) & the conference calls slowly stop happening.
A little leadership, a shared vision, metrics, practical importance, and a stopping point make it much simpler to maintain momentum.
Best of luck!
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