Community
October 7, 2014
Project Decision Making
It is one month into the academic year, and, even as someone who is working outside of academia, I’m getting that nagging feeling that October is here, the transition-month of September has passed, and it is time to put some momentum behind projects that were dormant over the summer or ideas that have been waiting for the new season in order to materialize.
I received some useful resources from a management and governance workshop for non-profits, including a sample decision-making grid. The grid lists qualities and objectives that a project should fulfill in keeping with the organization’s mandate, and potential projects can be rated from one to five for how well they meet each requirement in order to benefit the overall organization. While there is no set score that a potential project should achieve, the grid is a useful tool for thinking through a project’s feasibility and projected outcomes. It is definitely a tool that I will apply to my bpNichol digital edition project (which is broken into three sub-projects), to see whether or not I should change my approach, especially after meeting certain obstacles during my MA while trying to design a website. The grid could easily be tailored to determine if an editing project is a good fit for EMiC, if a certain editorial approach is appropriate for an individual project, or even if a particular work should be included in a collection based on how it contributes to the objectives of the finished edition.
A sample decision-making grid for potential EMiC projects is pictured below and also attached as a Sample Project Decision Grid PDF.
