First Closure Workshop

Thanks to a lot of hard work by Liz Neeley, I had a chance to run the project closure workshop online yesterday. I think it went pretty well, and I really enjoyed meeting all the participants, but as the saying goes, no lesson survives first contact with learners. In particular, there’s a lot of duplication, and I think I need to reorganize the material in a 2x2 scheme:

I hope to put it back together by September; if you’d interested in having me run it for your team or your colleagues, please give me a shout.

Here are some of the questions people still had at the end of the workshop:

• Universities/departments/programs are already very lean. How do we advise more trimming vs cutting/closing when there doesn’t appear to be more opportunities to cut?

• What do you do when you are the only one left on the project?

• This workshop is apparently aimed at leaders of research teams. Which specific parts would be suitable for junior/early-career people who aren’t in charge of things (yet)?

• How do we maintain connections with (former) colleagues when there is outright conflict during a wind-down?

• For soft-funded units, with people in mixed hard/soft roles, how do you close parts of an organization while others may remain or persist?

• How do you know if it’s the right time to shut down?

• At what point in the lifecycle of a project is it most important to create an emergency/shutdown plan?

• how do we help people who might be in denial come out of that mode without compromising the psychological safety we’re trying to build?

• How do we navigate shutdown in the kind of organization in which there are many stakeholders who have decision-making power over that?

• How/what do you prepare when shut down is a possibility but not certain? What framework do you use to decide to prioritize prevention vs mitigation?