Managing Projects in the Natural & Life Sciences and Beyond

Aims

A solid foundation in project management helps you with better planning, clearer prioritization, and more effective resource and communication management. In this course you will learn how to plan, structure, and implement your projects more effectively and efficiently, and become a more confident, organized, and capable project leader.

Content

This course introduces you to project management tools and methods that are tailored to the realities of your scientific work. These are the main learning objectives:

Project management basics

• Understand the fundamentals of project management in general and in the specific context of academic and industry research
• Learn about different project management tools, e.g. Gantt, Kanban, Project Canvas w/Miro, Scrum, Design Thinking, Retrospectives, etc.
• Translate knowledge into action by practicing scoping, WBS, milestones, stakeholder analysis, risk management, etc. in your own project

Working in international/intercultural/interdisciplinary teams

• Learn about the importance of roles and role clarity as a foundation for successful projects
• Improve collaboration, feedback, and communication within and between teams

Ownership and self-organization

• Learn techniques for planning and prioritization to strengthen your time and self-management skills
• Identify methods to deal with uncertainty and to overcome blocks

The acquired competencies are designed to be transferable to both academic careers and non-university career paths.

Methods

This workshop format features theoretical inputs and case studies, group work and peer coaching, where both beginners and advanced learners will profit from the exchange of experiences. Interactive exercises will give you plenty of opportunities to put your learning into practice and apply what you’ve learned to your current and future projects.

Target Group

All doctoral Candidates of the Faculty of Science

Requirements

No prior project management knowledge is required to participate in this course.

About the Trainer

Isabell Buttron is a biologist, science communicator, and project manager with over 20 years of professional experience. As the founder and CEO of her own company, she specializes in business consulting for life sciences, coaching individuals and teams, teaching, public speaking, and writing.

Workload

Course attendance: 2 x 8h
Follow-up assignment: 14h

Feature

This course is reserved for doctoral candidates of the Faculy of Science.

Once registration is open, applications will be collected for 24 hours and course places allocated by lot. All registrations received after the initial 24h period will be put on a waiting list and assigned on a first come, first served basis.

Course places/places on the waiting list will be confirmed by e-mail. Course registrations can only be canceled before the registration period ends (send an e-mail to grace@unibas.ch). Full course attendance is mandatory. Participants who fail to attend a course without prior notification or withdraw after the registration deadline are subject to a fee of CHF 30. In addition, participants who cancel their course registration at a later point in time, are absent without an excuse or do not attend the entire course will, for reasons of fairness, not be considered for course registration in the following semester and will be removed from other courses offered in the same semester. Please find the detailed regulations on the Transferable Skills Homepage.