When someone mentions a project manager, what often springs to mind is someone with that job title, leading a funded project to meet a set project outcome. If you are lucky, this may mean a Project Management Office (PMO) and the associated practices and controls. Depending on your viewpoint, this could be viewed as unnecessary meetings, paperwork and bureaucracy or the best thing ever to help ensure a project delivers - I like the latter. 

Recently, we have been reflecting on project management and university working. Odds are, most academics are project managers without either (a) realising it or (b) wanting to admit it. If you have done the following, or been asked to, you could be considered a project manager:



• Leading a module or a course
• Writing an action plan as part of annual monitoring
• Writing any action plan - for example, in response to the NSS
• Creating a new course
• Apply for and leading an internally-funded project (perhaps an education project)
• Introducing a new technology or process
• Working as a Deputy or Head of School
• The list goes on…! 

The chances are many of the above look familiar, and if so, then you are a project manager - congratulations. This raises the question of how much formal project management training an academic receives as part of their core CPD? For an academic, a PgCertHE, a requirement for most institutions, and rightly so, focuses on the practice and pedagogy of learning, teaching and assessment. Research training focuses on developing research practice, bid writing, funding, publication and perhaps PhD supervision. There is additional CPD that is perhaps aligned to project management but is this part of a structured and strategic training programme to support academic development? In our experiences, often not, but instead, individual choice. 

As a project manager, one would expect training, time, resources and support to deliver a project. In reality, and what often happens, is that someone is asked to write an action plan, design a new course and left to achieve this. Many are successful, and this is great, but could the outcome have been achieved better and with perhaps less stress and anxiety with formal training and approaches? We are seeing more structured approaches to course design, and there are some good companies with curriculum management/journey tools, but there is significant disparity. 

So, what does this all mean, if indeed anything? Is the proposition that all academics need to have elements of formal project management training aligned to their career journey? Project management, through the lens of a module and course leader, and then perhaps more as people enter senior roles? Is there an overlap with leadership and management training - if so, why and if not, should there be?sform-ed.uk