Whether you love or hate the New England Patriots (a separate discussion for a separate day, ideally over a cold beverage), those of you who follow football are probably familiar with Bill Belichick's mantra, “Do your job!” It’s pithy, it’s catchy, and it communicates exactly what it needs to communicate. If you do your job, you win. It’s when you fail to do your job that you’re likely to lose.
While I’m not always the biggest fan of sports analogies in business – they’re often clichéd, sometimes exclusionary, and occasionally just downright inaccurate – what I like about the motto “Do your job!” is precisely that you do not have to have any prior knowledge to understand it. You don’t need to know what a wide receiver is or what a tight end does, to understand that each of them serves a distinct purpose on the field and their roles are not interchangeable. At its core, “Do your job” is about clarity and accountability – two things we can all agree are important in the workplace.
In the modern workplace, where the ability to wear multiple hats is often extolled as a virtue, it’s easy for roles and responsibilities to become blurred. “Do your job!” has morphed into “Do what needs to be done!” Good or bad, love it or hate it, this shift in workplace culture is simply a fact of life in fast-paced industries like biotechnology. The danger here is that, when everyone wears multiple hats, who owns what can become fuzzy. And that lack of ownership and accountability can be a slippery slope into project failure. This is where project managers come in.
Project management as a field is about imposing structure and clarity onto complex, sometimes even chaotic settings. When biotechnology projects fail, it is frequently at the point of execution. This might be for any number of reasons. Perhaps there was no clear roadmap from research and design to execution. Maybe the project had no clear project manager, or project management was just one more duty assigned to a subject matter expert (SME) serving on the project.
Here at MustardSeed, we live the philosophy of “Do your job!” Investing in a skilled project manager not only guarantees you have a roadmap to project execution, but it also ensures clarity in roles and responsibilities. Let your project manager focus on planning and managing your project, so the rest of your team can do what they do best – delivering impactful scientific innovation and results.