Now that The March has launched, it’s been fruitful to reflect on the lessons we learned while building it. For me personally, serving as project manager for The March was an incredible learning experience and a huge challenge, to say the least. In this post I’ll focus on the takeaways that will shape how we approach the upcoming projects in the Mellon initiative.
Takeaway #1: Big projects need lots of project management.
I don’t just say this because I’m a project manager! A cross-disciplinary team needs communication, resources, and concrete plans. Without these things, it can be easy to lose focus and momentum. While managing The March, I got to test out a lot of project management techniques, and I’ll be honing my skills in the next two projects (launching this summer).
Takeaway #2: Collaboration raises important questions about ownership.
If twenty people, two institutions, and some outside contributors build something together, who owns it? Although the terms of our Mellon grant and a project’s service level agreement provide some practical answers to this question, plenty of theoretical ones remain. The March got us thinking about how to value and recognize the work of every collaborator and how to take responsibility for a collective product.
Takeaway #3: Keep your eye on the content.
Links may break, and software updates may cause unforeseen problems, but the biggest risks to projects like The March come from the content. The content is the heart and soul of a project, but like a living thing, it can be wily. The content for The March led us to discover so many wonderful and fascinating things that it constantly threatened to grow beyond the project’s scope. The content included copyrighted items, and team members spent a lot of time chasing down reproduction permissions. We wanted it to be as accessible as possible to all our users, and it took time and effort to make it the best it could be. Now that I know what to watch for, I’ll be keeping an eye out for content-related surprises in the upcoming projects.
Those are the big lessons I learned from The March and from my first six months as a digital humanities project manager. Here’s hoping the next six months are just as full of learning and effective collaboration.