Cost Effective Product and Project Management

Roundtable Discussion

The discussion by participants touched on the following:

Please provide the NISO audience with a brief description of your organization or institution and the community that you serve.  (Please be prepared to speak for two or two-and-a-half minutes about who you are, what you do, and the focus of your organization with regard to product or project management..)

For the sake of clarity, it would be useful to hear from each of you about how you define and/or categorize the work of product and project management. Are the two roles distinctly different in nature? Are the roles somewhat adjacent or is one nested within another? What might be some of the nuances?

 Where within your organization does responsibility for product management sit? What is the rationale for its placement in that setting? Are the functions such that the role can be spread across multiple individuals on staff?

How do you explain the value of the role to senior management or other decision-makers and colleagues? What do you think may be misunderstood about the role?

What skills, educational degree, or expertise do you look for when you’re hiring a product or project manager? Are there particular characteristics or personalities that tend to lend themselves to greater success in the role? 

How has the pandemic of the past 22 months affected the process of product management for your organizations? (Note: This is an opportunity to talk about aspects of working from home, Zoom meetings, etc.) Has that experience caused you to rethink aspects of the role or the associated workflow?  Or on how you build a team? What has elicited the best results for your specific organization?

What resources are critical to successful product management? If a smaller organization were to be starting out with limited resources or expertise, how would you advise them to structure the job or build the function for greatest effectiveness? How central to implementation is reliable project management? 

How do you use project management principles to interface with different organizations using the different approaches to project management?

What do you see with regard to emerging technologies, such as AI, for those working with research and scholarly outputs? What capabilities do you think users are most anxious to see in information products or resources?

In what areas might standards or recommended practices be useful in successful product and project management?

Resources shared by our panel:

Shared by speaker, Maureen Adamson: Agile Practice Guide, Project Management Institute