Research Management, Planning and Collaboration

Research Methodology

Prof. Jebran Khan

Research Planning

• People feel that the time of researchers is very flexible, so time management skills are not a critical attribute for them.
• On the contrary, possibility of flexibility actually requires that researchers be good time managers.
• Research, invariably, needs long hours because the results might be unexpected and unpredictable, and some procedures may take longer than expected.
• Performing an activity satisfactorily requires a certain amount of time, and in general many activities are needed to be performed.
• Management of the available time of a researcher is important for effective and efficient execution of one or more tasks, and inadvertently affects the time of collaborators, managers or supervisors as well.
• Therefore, reasonable estimates of time required for each activity must be done, and careful time management of all the expected activities is required so as to reserve time for unforeseen circumstances.
• This is the only possible way to recover from minor disruptions in certain activities which is inevitable.

Prioritize and Say No to Procrastination

• In many cases, engineering researchers have many additional responsibilities like conducting or assisting, and studying for courses, field data collection, laboratory assistantship, tutoring, invigilation, and so on.
• A researcher needs to be skillful in managing time and deadlines so that there is no omission or underperformance on any of these important tasks, lower research quality, depression.
• Research schedule should be appropriately chalked out to fit all the expected tasks into the time available to complete those tasks.
• Requests for extension may not help, and often may damage the career either by increasing the time to achieve the goals or being one’s competency and work ethic into question.
• However, time spent on leisure or talking to people, including networking with other researchers, who may be unrelated to the present work being undertaken, is not a waste and helps maintain one’s physical and mental health, and ultimately may aid in the research output.
• Time management is essentially the organization of time such that the desired goals are most effectively met.

Prioritize and Say No to Procrastination

• Being more organized helps instill self-confidence, reduces stress and enhances satisfaction in a researcher. As a result, one is able to engage in productive research and find a faster pace in career growth, apart from improved health and interpersonal relations.
• On the contrary, poor time management is often the result of procrastination (action of delay or postponing works). If someone procrastinates more and more activities, the more and more pressure is built up, thereby adversely impacting performance.
• It is vital to complete documents when the work is done or when action is needed; proposals for funding must obviously meet any submission deadlines.
• Procrastination may cause similar work to be published by someone else.
• Example:
• It has been seen that many times when two people came up with the same invention, the person who was actually second to make the discovery got the patent or was published first, and received all the laurels.

Prioritize and Say No to Procrastination

• Why research planning important?: Researcher will have a limit to the amount of time that one can spend on it. Because,
• the institution might dictate a time limit, or
• one may only have funding for a certain period, or
• researcher might himself wants to get on with the next work.
• Why research always take more time than anticipated?: Research always seems to take longer than anticipated. Because,
• Before one conducts research literature that must be read and background to be learnt,
• Need to get evidence via lab work or in the field,
• Then need to analyze results and developing models,
• Finally, writing down the work and presenting it to the community.
• There are many twists and turns and dead ends. Also, there are moments of despair and there are moments of enlightenment. Sometimes progress is fast and sometimes it is slow.
• It is very nonlinear with a great deal of inherent uncertainty, therefore, planning also need to be nonlinear with extra time need to be allocated in each phase of the research development.

Nonlinear Planning

Planning for the Objective, Adapting with Feedback

• Time is certainly a resource, a very precious resource, and one should optimize that resource, but it does not drive the process. Because time allocated to a certain activity, has come to an end, does not ensure that the activity has been actually completed or finished.
• Research is an attempt to make contribution to knowledge and that comes from two things, the actual new knowledge and its value to the community.
• Through research we make new knowledge and that increases in scope and significance within the community.
• Ideally, we would like to be up at the top of the plane, where we have a large scope and large significance.

Planning for the Objective, Adapting with Feedback

• How can we judge where we are on this plane on a regular basis?
• Answer is by checking whether we are progressing toward our final objective or not. Incremental approach ensures that one always knows where one is on the research plane of knowledge scope and significance, and one has the ability to adapt quickly as one learns and discovers more.
• Suppose, we have done a lot of new work and made the new knowledge, we need to send it out for review or examination and we need to receive the feedback from expert.
• The new knowledge is only made during the writing process, and so one should be writing continuously and not only at the end, so as to enable using the learning and discovering to guide the knowledge production process as it unfolds. This is how the flaws get found and where we see the different directions that might need to be taken.
• We would like to enable the feedback process as much as possible so that we can know sooner rather than later if there is a problem with the work. Also we need to be adaptive with the feedback of the experts.
• Regular feedback enables us to chart our position and our progress on the research plane.

Research Management

Set and Achieve Milestones

• Establishing goals and objectives is the first step of effective research.
• Goals are statements that focus on ends rather than means and define what are the future expected outcomes and provide direction.
• Objectives are clear, specific, measurable, and deadline-driven statements of action that enables one to achieve the goals.
• Based on objectives, a researcher can set milestones that pass on the way to completing the entire task.
• If one is disorganized, one may lose the will and momentum to complete it.
• But if one organizes the effort and sets milestones one can monitor one’s progress with respect to those targets, and build momentum as one passes them.
• To do lists (in written form) can serve as milestones and free up one’s mind from the burden of remembering tasks, and rather one can focus on completing the tasks.

Set and Achieve Milestones

• Each broad research task can usually be divided into sub-tasks and there are inherent delays between sub-tasks. It is important to explore flexibility and try to interleave the sub-tasks of different planned tasks.
• Multitasking may be an efficient usage of the researcher’s time as per the comfort level, but every researcher should evaluate how much multitasking they can perform.
• Checkpoints must be part of any time plan to accomplish any task, and there must be time points to stop, ponder, revise time-estimates if needed, and evaluate the inevitable slips till that point.
• Tasks may not play out as was expected in the first place and therefore it is necessary to have review sessions with peers and advisor/manager, as often as feasible.
• During the review, the team can adjust a researcher’s time plan and incorporate self-correction mechanisms based on the challenges faced in handling the assigned tasks, or adopt completely new plans.
• Even if a researcher is not in a position to get on to an assigned task straightaway, there is still the need for review while the discussion is still fresh.
• Researchers effectively need to take notes on each review session. Without notes, forgetting the details is normal and the ability to have good research outcome will become more challenging.

• Effort management deals with appropriate utilization of time and resources to accomplish planned tasks. Performing any activity requires a certain amount of effort, and research works are not different.
• The type and extent of effort depend on the nature of the activity not with time. However, understanding issues related to effort is crucial to proper time management.
• Effort depends on energy: Physical and intellectual.
• Physical energy refers to the ability and strength to do active physical things and the feeling that you are full of physical power and life
• Physical energy is important is research and has arisen as part of general social awareness.
• Intellectual energy includes energy spent in observation, reading and absorption, writing and speaking, programming, experimenting, and tedious calculations.
• Intellectual energy gets drained out in varying degrees based on research task and the researcher, but can be replenished in different ways by different persons.

Effort Management in Research

• During time management in research, a healthy mix of high-energy and low-energy tasks is useful.
• Nature of energy requirement and consumption is complex.
• However, in certain cases, different high-energy tasks can be done one after another or sometimes researchers are bound to do different high-energy tasks consecutively due to the sequence of such work.
• Understanding and improving one’s capability for different kinds of energy helps in improving effective energy utilization.

Effort Management in Research

Research Collaboration

• Understanding about collaboration and with whom and when need to collaborate are important issues of a successful research career.
• Collaboration involves jointly participating in a project and contributing to its possible completion. Therefore, collaboration can be effective in completing the task at hand.
• Make a positive contribution in terms of ideas and also in terms of working out details to keep the research project moving ahead.
• For instance, it’s impossible to have all the necessary equipment in one’s laboratory, or in research laboratory or in a organization.
• Engineering research requires diverse skill sets and strengths, and these skills and capabilities usually develop over a period of time. If one don’t have a specific skills on a particular research area then they can collaborate with corresponding skillful researcher or groups.
• Research collaboration almost naturally happens or becomes imperative when one attempts to participate in interdisciplinary research.
• Collaboration provides distinct advantages such as division of work and the share of expertise. Therefore, assists on quality outcomes and faster completion of projects.

Attributes of Research Collaboration