Project Management

Posted on Thursday, 19th January 2006, 08:02 PM, by Chris, under Computing, University, Work.

After looking at how to read, annotate and store papers you’ve read it’s useful to discuss how to organise your research in the scope of a project.

Research Journal

On the MSc course at Glasgow we have all been asked to buy a hardback ledger in which we are to keep a diary of what we are doing in our research. That’s fine, but I’m a computing scientist, writing things down goes against the grain – I want a computing related solution to this problem.

After a while contemplating I concluded that alternatives to having a hardback book would be:

  1. blogging software (i.e. WordPress)
  2. wiki software (i.e. MediaWiki)

Blogs

Blogs lend themselves to chronological recording of data, after-all they are in necessity online diaries. Blogs can be a simple way to record ideas, dates of events and so on.

Wikis

Wikis, although not strictly ordering entries by time and date, allow for very easy addition and formatting of new content. Most wikis will allow you to create categorised or special pages. For example in MediaWiki pages can be prefixed when naming them, this can be used to categorise the pages.

Combinations

Both blogging software and wikis can be used in combination of course, blogs giving the chronological progression between different research papers and wikis showing the resulting thoughts, summaries and so on that you generate.

Why do it?

Keeping a digital version of this information means we don’t have any issue with loosing the research journal or spilling coffee over it (note: don’t spill coffee over your computer either).

Project co-ordinators can see how you are progressing, comment on what they think of your research via comment mechanisms in a blog and talk/discuss pages on a wiki.

Collaborations

Online versions of research journals can help in collaborative projects – the research journal becomes a platform for collective reasoning, interaction, and the sharing of ideas.

If you don’t want to do it electronically

The real lesson to take away from this post is that a research journal is a good thing to have, be it a bound book, wiki, blog or whatever combination.

My Wiki usage

I am currently doing research on my project for the year, which is what sparked this article, SonG. For the project I use a wiki to manage my research, post ideas, and transcribe meeting minutes to mention a few things. I thought it may be useful to share the page title formats I use for doing so.

Meetings:

  • Index: Meetings
  • Meeting: Meeting:[YYYY][MM][DD]
  • YYYY = year, MM = month and DD = day

Papers:

  • Index: Papers
  • Paper: Paper:[KEY]
  • KEY = the bibliography key for the paper

Project specific:

  • Title: [Project]:[Title]
  • I.e. SonG:Links

I hope this is useful to anyone doing a project involving any type of research, although this type of journal is not restricted to only research based projects.

- Chris

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  • Neil

    We have to keep a Lab Book at work of everything we do, much like this. They insist on it being a paper copy though.

    Lab books are used if we have to apply for a patent on some work we’ve been doing (some of the guys I work with have a scary number of telecoms patents to their name). No idea why a paper copy is more believable than electronic… sure it’d be hard to forge a lab book with hundreds of pages of random notes and three pages of pertinent info but not impossible if you really wanted the patent.

    I do run a Wiki for making notes on to transfer thoughts from work to home though. I am consistently about to fall asleep when suddenly I think of the solution to the problem I’m having at work and I used to just email this to my work address. A wiki is much better though.

    To actually get moderately back on point, I agree with Chris. No matter what you’re working on, be it development, research or whatever making a note of your thoughts at the time can be invaluable. Especially if two months down the line a colleague queries your choices and you find it hard to rationalise it.

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