Introduction [00:05]
We’ve now got an array of tools available to us that are part of our suite of apps in the University that we can use to manage projects. That’s what I really want to just come across today. First thing, I apologise if I am telling people or teaching people how to suck eggs. But if there are things in here that people don’t know about, then I’ve only got ten minutes today, so please get in touch with me. Drop me a Teams message or an email or whatever. I’ll be happy to spend some one-on-one time with you. I’ve said my bit. I’ll share my screen. I will share screen 2, hopefully.

Microsoft Planner [00:45]
This set of apps is available to us obviously on the Office 365. We can get to these additional apps by logging into an Office 365 account office.com with our MWS credentials. What I’m going to do today, I’m going to talk about Planner. I’m going to go into Gantt Charts and Excel and then I’m going to talk about something outside of that remit, which is Mural. Hopefully you’re all going to get something new.

The first thing: Planner. Planner is an app which is like the stage up from… For example people might be managing projects and tasks using Microsoft Outlook. Or they might be even writing them down on a to-do list – and that’s absolutely fine. There’s nothing wrong with them. Planner is like the next level of tech for managing your projects and your tasks. To get to that, if I click on click on Planner and then create a new plan, a new plan is essentially your project, so whatever that might be. I’ll just put a test in here and hopefully no one’s already got a test one.

Whatever that project might be, that will be your plan. Then once that’s been created, in here you’ve got a very simple interface where you can start to create tasks. It does get a bit more interesting than just assigning tasks. Some of the work streams in your project might be, for example, to do some stakeholder mapping. I’ll just put stakeholders in there and then I’ll add another bucket, which might be finance. Then maybe something around comms. Now I’m beginning to break down my project into the various components of what they are by just adding a new bucket. In a new bucket I can have various multiple tasks.

Now I’ve got those stages of the project and I’ve mapped all those out already, I’m now at the point where I can start to add those tasks in. If I just create a task in here in stakeholders, for example, and do something around; say I’m going to create a stakeholder map. Once I’ve added that task and I now click on that task, I get some more detail. This is where you’re getting into that project management sphere because not only can you set the progress and the priority of those tasks. You can assign those tasks to other people.

Right at the bottom there – I should have done that before, actually – I could’ve assigned that to another member of a team, to a manager, to whoever it is within the organisation. Not only can I do that; I can add a checklist to the item. If that that task is fairly big there are going to be lots of sub-tasks to create in a stakeholder map. It could just start with a phone call, for example. One of the checklists could be: call, I don’t know, Sue for some other reason.

Then you start to really break down these things; you break down these tasks into their individual components. Obviously you can create attachments there and you can do all the bits in there and make comments. As they start to get completed, you can start to update the completion status.

For this one I’m just going to add in progress at the moment. Then I’m going to close that down. One other slight thing; you can call a code and you can change the name of those calls, should you so wish. I’m going to add another task in here which is going to be; I’m going to set this task to be an overdue. I’m just going to put create report. I’m going to set the due date to overdue, and this time I’m going to assign it to myself and add that task. There’s nothing else I need to put in there. I could add some extra detail like I did before, but I don’t think I need to on this.

So you can see now we can build up a list of tasks related to a component of your project. Then we get to the nice stuff. In here now, once you start to get some tasks going, they’ve been assigned to other people, you start to get some metrics back into this dashboard field. Once you’ve got, say, ten or 11 tasks in here you can start to configure these graphs. You might want this as a bar chart etc. You can start to change the features of these; what’s urgent, what’s overdue so it gives you that very clear indication at a glance of what’s overdue, what hasn’t been done yet and so on.

The schedule is just the same as it would be in Outlook. It’s a calendar view but it does show the tasks that I’ve put in there and then when they are due or when they need to be completed. Just as an aside, you’re project managing whatever it might be. You’ve got a group of people; when you start to assign them their tasks in Planner, they will start to have email notifications that they’ve been assigned a task. It’ll appear in their dashboard so they’ll get an overview of that project that’s been created at the same time. They’ll be able to see what tasks are for them or what tasks are for others.

So very quickly you can build up a pure project management methodology just by using Planner. I think Planner is really cool. I really like that but it doesn’t go quite far enough. By the way, all these down here, these are plans that I use regularly. I assign tasks. Not everybody does the tasks that I assign them on time, but that’s another issue.

You need a stage further. Sometimes when you’re project managing, and like you guys will be, you might have multiple things on the go at the same time. You’re going to want a bit more of an overview of that. So this is a very simple spreadsheet. You can create Gantt charts on various templates out there. You can create a Gantt chart on PowerPoint if you wish. You can use those more expensive programmes. You can download Trello and so on. But if you want something that’s really quick and easy and you want a very quick visual glance of the progress of your collection of projects – which would be normally called a programme – here’s a real example of what I’m working on at the moment, where I’m up to, how long these projects are due to run for. You can see here for example the induction module is not yet complete and I’m overdue on that induction module.

Here is your overview of projects. Like I said, you’ve got that Gantt chart. You’ve got that reporting mechanism for all the projects now. Very easy to set up. What I’ll do with this, if anyone’s interested in using this, I will drop the file either in the Zoom chat. I’ll drop a link to the file either in the Zoom chat or I can put it somewhere shareable. This is just a template that I created and then changed to fit with the academic year. We run from August for a couple of years along there.

There’s your overview. Let’s go back to that stakeholder thing in here and where we had an element of the project, which was create a stakeholder map. What if you want to do that? We’re all working remotely and not all of us are back on campus yet so there’s a big divide at the moment. You might have people on campus and off campus.

Mural [08:40]
One of the best tools I’ve come across since being in lockdown is Mural. Mural is external to the University, but being an educational establishment we get free access. I would recommend everybody sign up for a Mural account; it’s fantastic! I’m going to give you a very quick whistle-stop tour of Mural. It’s a collaborative tool that can be used just like this and Zoom calls or Team chats, where everybody collaborates on the same document at the same time synchronously. You can all see each other’s activity as you’re going along.

It works through whiteboards, I guess similar to Padlet and apps like that, but it’s a bit more in-depth. One of the great things is, you get access to templates. Here are some of the things that we’ve been working on recently in the team. You can see some of these are filled in. I won’t go into them because it might have somebody’s names and so on and so forth. Let’s say I’ve come to this place now and I want to get a meeting together and I want to do some stakeholder mapping.

Mural has lots of templates and you can see here the fourth one across is a stakeholder mapping template. Perfect. I’m going to click on that and I’m going to use that template. What we’ve got here, just like I said, you’ve got a whiteboard essentially which lots of people can work on at the same time. Let me just create the Mural from template so you get a real version of it. Once you’ve created this from a template, I can now share it out to whoever and as many people as I want just by using the invite link.

Then we can get those people into Mural and start working on things at the same time. During meetings during lockdown, we’ve been working on various different things. Just for the purposes of the example here I’m going to just zoom right into the identify stakeholders template. Let’s say people have got ideas about where these things can be; they can drag around the Post-its that are there, or they can add in their own Post-its. So what I’ve done in the past is, I’ve said, ‘Can you guys use blue? We’ll use yellow’ and you can start to then very quickly just drag in, make some comments. I want Sue in this one. I want, I don’t know, Bob in here so very quickly you can drag in that. You can start to work collaboratively on that stakeholder mapping process.

Right at the bottom you can see there’s a little symbol there; it’s myself that that’s working in the Mural. So when you get more people you’ll get other little circles; nine, ten, eleven people all working on it at the same time. People all have the same rights, so they can drag in their own stickies, they can do whatever they like. They can start to make connections between what people are saying. I might say, ‘Yes, that makes perfect sense to me.’ I think, yes, I agree with Sue on that; you can make those connections.

You’ve got loads of icons in here so I think, yes, Bob’s idea was great, I’m going to put a couple of flames on Bob’s idea! Or maybe it wasn’t so great. We can add in different elements in here straightaway. We can add grids in and so forth and we can add in images. It’s a great tool for project management. It’s a great tool for collaborating all at the same time and generating those ideas.

Like I said, it’s not part of the University’s suite of things but it is free for educators. All you need to do is sign up with a free account, run the free account for 30 days and then move that across to an educational account. There’s lots more to Planner, there’s lots more to Gantt charts on Excel and there’s a lot more to Mural than I’ve currently shown.

Like I said, if you’ve got questions, please feel free to get hold of me. I’m sure the guys in the Prosper team will do all the signposting that they can. Thanks for your time.

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Hello everyone, my name’s Ruth Nugent, I’m an archaeologist here at Liverpool. I’m a very new PI on my first project ever. I only joined the University in November and I hired my first two team members in February and then immediately went into lockdown. So it’s been quite a trial by fire getting everything sorted. As I say, I’m very new so what I thought I’d do is just give you a few things that I’ve found have been really helpful that I’ve needed to think through.

I was saying to Kathy and Fiona before; it’s been a really helpful exercise for me to reflect on what actually has happened since March when we all went into lockdown. I’m on a humanities project; it’s digital humanities. We can work virtually, which was fantastic. I don’t know what we would have done if we couldn’t. I have a data technician who is in the UK, and which is shielding and had several medical appointments during the time as well. Then my other postdoc was in Austria in during lockdown.

So she’s had to work virtually anyway with lockdown happening at different rates and different expectations, and constant anxiety of when she can return to Liverpool, and her partner’s job. It’s not just about managing research itself, but actually the way that our lives have been impacted by this. A couple of things that I found that were really, really helpful for us were, we just set up a really regular routine that we always meet on a Wednesday morning at the same time.

It became like this anchor on the project that we always knew where we were on a Wednesday morning and we were going to see each other. I think that helped reduce very lengthy essay-length emails to try and establish things during the week. If we could wait until Wednesday morning, if it could wait until Wednesday, we got a lot more accomplished much faster, and in a more friendly manner than trying to get things resolved by email. It can be quite complicated on any kind of research project.

It prevented things escalating into people getting frustrated or people wasting time doing things they hadn’t understood. That was really helpful for us. We also were meeting other people as well as much as we could. We’re very good friends with the Lancaster DH team – digital humanities team – so we’d meet with them. It was just informal. Yes, we discussed best practice and things like that, but just to try to connect outwards. I think for a couple of weeks on our project we felt we’d become very insular-looking because we had to establish our own morale and our own workflow and how we’re going to work together.

I think one of the things that I found as the PI was to keep the team actually connected outwards so we didn’t end up being quite claustrophobic, and to remember that we’re part of a wider landscape, a wider community of scholars. As Alberto was talking before, we had long discussions about creating time to go away and learn things online. Suddenly you might have seen during COVID; this was webinar after webinar suddenly emerged of things that would have normally been held in person or only held at a certain university.

So encouraging them to take advantage of that, so one of the things I found in terms of managing time was, I began to plan our actual workload at 75 per cent rather than 100 per cent to give us that margin for people to go away and do other things. Also when lockdown fog just descended on us and we were not necessarily in a good place to be doing research, or life was impacting, having that 25 per cent margin became really helpful for us. The other thing that I found really helpful was, I found that lockdown fog meant I had to be a lot more patient than I expected, and a lot of repetition of things that I know would have been grasped immediately normally. I found out I had to just – with constant reassurance a lot more repetition of, ‘You’re doing the right thing. That is what I want you to do. Thank you for that, you’ve done really well.’

That became really, really helpful, and also learning when to pause a conversation. Normally when you’re in office time together – because we would’ve been sharing an office together otherwise – you can let things just roll out over days and weeks. That’s not helpful or necessarily healthy when you know that most people want to clock off at a certain time in the evening. They don’t necessarily want to roll over into weekends either. Being able to pause conversations and go, ‘Can we actually talk about that in person on Wednesday’ or, ‘I can meet with you separately’, to be able to offer that in-person reassurance.

Also to prevent people feeling anxiety like, ‘I haven’t got a decision on this or this hasn’t been resolved yet’ or, ‘What do I do next?’ It was trying to find that balance of how to reassure as well as what I’m reassuring you about. As PI I always try to give regular updates on just small things you’ve done really well this week, and monthly targets that we’ve met. Even if we haven’t met the targets – which occasionally happens – to go, ‘But we did this.’ We remember all the things we’ve had to go through to get to this point.

That’s fantastic that we’ve managed to actually do that. It was really front-loading conversations all the time with the positive things that we’ve achieved, and where we’re currently sitting and milestones that we’ve met. Also to remind you of things that I’m doing as PI. I think my natural instinct was to descend as mother hen and make sure everybody else was okay. I found actually just going, ‘Well, I’ve done this and I’ve got this running in the background’ and remembering that they want to hear what I’m up to.

It helped them see the impact of their contribution. I think sometimes particularly when you’re working on your own virtually, you can get locked just into your task. It can get quite a repetitive task. Particularly some of our work – like many – is data entry, it’s quite repetitive stuff. So I found two things which was first of all to always remind them the impact their small-scale task has on the whole thing of the project. Keeping that big picture; because you’ve done that we can now do this in three months’ time. Or we’re now at this stage in terms of milestones.

I also found that having a focus on the way that they’re actually switching up tasks, so I tried to ensure that they weren’t getting locked into really, really repetitive tasks that were being so unstimulating, they were actually getting quite depressed at certain points. I could see it in their faces sometimes. It’s like, ‘I’ve been doing this for three weeks now and eight hours a day.’ Trying to switch up with bigger-picture tasks that we could do that were more stimulating. Or just setting up more stimulating discussion points during the team meetings that weren’t about tasks; about what we want to achieve or what we’ve been reading.

We always try to have a balance now between technical tasks that we can do when we’re braindead and it’s the end of the day, but also more stimulating stuff that’s more research focused.

We found that really useful. I find as well, just being really human. I think that lockdown or not, going first and holding hands to go, ‘I really should’ve been clearer on that decision there’, or admitting mistakes and my own frustrations and saying, ‘Look, Thursday was a bad day for me. I felt like clocking off at three o’clock and this happened.’ Giving them permission to be human at home and not to feel they’ve got to come with their best self for every meeting. Just go, ‘This is a crazy time. Let’s just be honest about that.’

That created a real culture of honesty then amongst us that was really, really positive. We became much more solution orientated. We could share each other’s, carry each other’s burdens but then to pick up and go, ‘Actually we have done this really, really well so where can we go next with it?’ Then just two more things I’d mention. One, we work on SharePoint. That’s been our lifesaver was SharePoint, and we found that having just a single central place where all decisions that we’ve made are recorded, so minutes of meetings, actions of minutes but also just things I’ve got summarised in an email thread.

Trying to keep track of what was said in a meeting and to go, ‘As a result of all these different ways that we’ve communicated virtually, this is what we’ve decided.’ We’ve all signed off and agreed on that – and that saved so many potential arguments about, ‘Well, you said this and I thought she was going to…’ We were just great from that point on, so I really recommend that. I think the last thing I’d mention is: I think working virtually, I sometimes felt pressured to give a snap decision on something because they’re right there. I can email you straightaway, I can send you a message in Teams, I can chat with you on whatever. I found actually to just take a step back and realise that sometimes it was just anxiety that’s driving the need to have a snap decision on something.

Actually in the real world, we’d research this; we’d take a good three weeks forward to go and figure out what to do there. Is email the best form for us to even discuss this right now? Do we actually just need more time? I found that my postdocs then felt pressure off for themselves to go away and go, ‘Look, I’ve raised an issue. I’ve got three days to go and think about it now. Ruth said we’re going to discuss it Wednesday. Oh actually I’ve got a solution for this now or it’s not a bigger deal.’ Or actually, ‘No, I’ve thought of more things we need to discuss.’ That was really super helpful for us.

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Hello everybody, it’s good to see some familiar names on here. The team have just asked me to talk about what I’ve done in terms of running my research group remotely during lockdown. I’ve put a few slides together. Can everybody see the slides? I’m at a slightly different career stage to Ruth, so I’ve been at the University about 20 years now and on the academic staff for about 16, 17 years. I’ve been running a research group for an extended period of time. Actually many of the things that she’s just said really chimed with my experiences and the way I’ve tried to deal with things.

I’m also, as well as a PI, currently a head of department. From the aspect of how much time I can throw at this, it’s more difficult with the head of department role. But I’ll just take you through some of the things that I’ve done. With a colleague who’s also on the academic staff, we run our research group jointly. Just to give you an idea of the size, this was at the beginning of lockdown with three PDRAs and three PhD students. I’ve actually had a couple of the PDRAs leave during that time and one of the PhD students graduate.

I would say I don’t think I’ve done much that’s particularly novel. It’s fairly obvious, from the solutions, that you’ve all got accustomed to now and that we’re on here with Zoom and Teams. So in the main, physical meetings are becoming virtual – with a few things a little bit differently. We always had a mix of group meetings and individual meetings, and we continued that. But we’ve really made sure that the weekly meeting always took place. That was interesting that Ruth said that was a key thing of her as well. We stuck to one hour per week per individual, and then used a mixture of Teams or Skype. We still use a mix depending upon the individual.

Then with the weekly group meetings, we had a mix of things. I used it as an opportunity to invite a lot of external speakers who I wouldn’t otherwise have got, to give talks. The beauty of that is of course there’s no travel time for them. This gives a great research culture for the group, I think, that they get to see fantastic talks from world leaders and, in a small group of ten of us, ask them questions. We kept that very informal. We’d mix that in with meetings where we have either our internal seminars, where one of the PDRAs or students would give a talk on their work, or more general kind of catch-up meetings of five, ten minutes each; just what am I doing?

As Ruth said, I also thought this was useful that myself and David actually also did a couple of slides as, ‘Okay, what have we been doing during lockdown? What are the challenges that we are facing? How are we coping?’ Then every week, either at the beginning or the end or sometimes the entire session, we had, ‘How am I feeling’ discussions, which for engineers we wouldn’t normally do. I’ll give some examples of what one of my postdocs did on that in a second so you can see that type of thing. We tried really to do that.

We were very aware that two of the PhD students were all international. One of the PhD students was in Liverpool in a house on his own because all the other students had left. So we were very worried about that student being isolated. One of the other students was in a shared house but also quite isolated. So we were keen for these discussions to try and help people get through this. We had some people successfully leaving the group, getting postdocs elsewhere and passing the PhD viva.

So we also had separate celebration meetings where we had a virtual drink session and toasted their achievements. Everybody got to say a few words. Actually that was really nice because we were able to mimic some of the things that we might have done in the physical world and not just let the opportunity go. A couple of things that I did. My research is a mixture of experimental and numerical research so there was some reorganisation of workload, just going back to the video we had from the oncologist that some of my experimental PhD students and postdocs, we switched them a little bit. One of them wrote a review article and luckily we’re in a position where a few of them could write up.

One of the things as well, I also broadened out the group so I invited former postdocs and PhD students to join in the weekly sessions as well if they wanted. This was quite important so I recognised that when lockdown started in March, I’ve got an EPSRC fellowship at the moment which funded two of the PDRAs. They were due to finish in September and should have been finishing this month. I was suddenly very aware at the time that they would be looking to get the next post.

All universities were basically shutting down and posts were just being not advertised. What I did was speak to our financial person and say, ‘Look, in the next six months we’re not going to be doing any experimental work. We’re not going to be doing any travel. If I via all that money into staff costs, how much longer can I keep the two PDRAs?’ I was able to extend both of their contracts until March 2021. I had contacted EPSRC, obviously, and got the no-cost extension, was able to do that. I thought that was helpful in terms of their peace of mind. It’s not the greatest extension, but still six months, I just thought that will give us a little bit of additional time. So they didn’t have that additional fear that during lockdown that their post would be ending.

This is just an example of what we had. In April, for example, every week we had an international speaker. We were able to get a very high level of speakers, a worldwide audience as it were. It was all free. The last week in April I asked my co-editor of the journal that I edit, the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics, to give this. He’s in Canada, so it was 9 am in the morning for him, but it worked really well. He said, ‘We should do something like this on a more broader level and open it up to the community.’

That led us to set up the Complex Fluids Seminar series, which has been running at 5:00 pm every Wednesday UK time. We’re in our 18th week in a row of running this. This is something that’s come out of something that I was doing for my group. We saw how easy it was to run. We’ve got about almost 1000 people on the email list now, but in our maximum talk we had 550 people on a Zoom watching a talk from somebody from MIT. So that’s really been a fantastic thing which has come out of this, which came out of first of all running the research group.

All of my research group join in on that as well, which is fantastic. This is an example of what one of the PDRAs did, so this was quite early on and I cost this. Each asked to talk about what they’ve been doing. This where he’s got isolation in lower and upper caps. It’s meant to indicate the kind of rollercoaster of emotions that he was going on. He gave four or five slides of what he’d been working on. Then he had some suggestions of what to do, so enjoy your time at home. He was getting a little bit stressed out by all the news and following the death statistics in the early days. So he found that very difficult and actually thought it was better not to follow the news so closely.

He had some suggestions for trying to keeping his mental health going well; playing computer games, sleeping well, communicating with others as well. We actually asked the postdocs to be checking in on the students who were living alone. Then he’d done something that he wanted to give back to, so he’d actually also donated blood. My research here is viscoelastic fluids, and that’s why he said it’s a viscoelastic fluid. I’d say I didn’t do an awful lot that was particularly novel. I think it was a lot about keeping in good communication with people. Just having that weekly meeting with a whole group I think can really help.

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