Managing Your Research Project: A Guide for Researchers (Insider Guides to Success in Academia)

Managing Your Research Project is a practical and accessible guide that will help researchers navigate the complexities of project management. This user-friendly resource offers valuable insights and tools for funded, commissioned, unfunded, and student research in academic settings.

Instead of advocating for a single project management approach, the book provides a variety of options, empowering readers to develop a style that works best for them. Each chapter is packed with practical tools and examples, offering easy-to-follow guidance on how to keep a project moving forward. Key topics include selecting the right project management approach, utilising effective tools, addressing ethical considerations, and managing critical aspects such as time, relationships, finances, bureaucracy, visibility, and quality assurance. While project management can be demanding, this book shows readers how to approach it so that it can be a satisfying, collaborative, rewarding experience. Along the way, the authors address the potential challenges and pitfalls of managing research projects and offer strategies to overcome them.

This essential guide equips researchers with the knowledge and strategies they need to manage their projects efficiently and effectively.

‘Insider Guides to Success in Academia’ offers support and practical advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and remain, in academia.

These neat pocket guides fill specific and significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider perspectives on the often-implicit rules of the game – the things you need to know but usually aren’t told by institutional postgraduate support, researcher development units, or supervisors – and will address a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors, mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in academia.

Inger Mewburn is the Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University, Australia.

Pat Thomson is a professor of education, School of Education at the University of Nottingham, UK, as well as an adjunct professor at the Free State University, South Africa, and a visiting professor at Deakin University, Australia.

Helen Kara is an independent researcher and writer based in the United Kingdom.

Aimee Grant is an associate professor and Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow at Swansea University, UK.