How do education research-practice partnerships (RPPs) organize their day-to-day work? What does project management look like in RPPs, given the many partners involved in the work and the number of research projects with different timelines that often go on simultaneously? In this Extra Credit article, we take a look at these important questions, which are not generally part of the literature on RPPs, and yet are absolutely critical for partnerships to answer. In particular, we have invited the Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC) to share their approach to project management and describe lessons the partnership has learned over time. 

HERC: A Brief Overview

Founded in 2011 under the leadership of Ruth López Turley, HERC began as a research-practice partnership between Rice University and the Houston Independent School District (HISD). In 2017, HERC’s research collaboration expanded to include 10 additional district partners from the surrounding Houston area. HERC’s work focuses on improving the connection between education research and decision making for the purpose of equalizing outcomes by race, ethnicity, economic status, and other factors associated with inequitable educational opportunities. To name a few of the topical areas, HERC has developed collaborative research efforts focused on school closures, student mobility, long-term English learners, and equitable access to academic programming. Currently, HERC has over 45 active projects. Its 23 staff members and multiple district partners work collaboratively to ensure effective execution and outcome of HERC projects.

Why a Project Management Tool

As most know, a high level of collaboration across multiple partners is required for an RPP to be successful. Each of our projects typically involve a research-side team, a district liaison, and a practice-side partner. In order to enable and oversee such collaborative work, HERC needed to create a “place” where various tasks within projects could be tracked, stored, and worked on. These efforts include but are not limited to tracking meetings, documents, data requests, project progress, deliverables, and outcomes of the research (for example, tracking how the research was used). For HERC, Monday.com, a cloud-based, customizable management platform, serves as “Grand Central Station” where all of these efforts connect.

Selecting the Right Tool

HERC first selected Monday.com as its project management tool of choice in 2018 and it has proven to be very effective in supporting the work throughout the subsequent growth of the partnership. More specifically, it has allowed HERC to collaboratively oversee its work and track its output.

HERC’s main criteria for choosing a project management tool included:

• The ability for project members to collaborate and access up to date information
• Ease in managing multiple project timelines and project subtasks
• Application integrations with services such as Zoom, Box, and Google Docs

For research-side team members, HERC’s main goals for using Monday.com are to manage timelines, efforts, and subtasks within each project. HERC support staff can also build workflows and task boards that indirectly assist with research development. For example, the administration team tracks the onboarding of new employees, team leads engage with their members, and individuals can track their own tasks across projects. Another collaborating feature is the ability to manage users. Each project board can have unique designated users, therefore allowing research leads to appropriately manage specific project access.

How Partnership Members Use the Tool

In Monday.com, each project is housed on a page referred to as a “board.” HERC can determine board access and/or what items on the board can be changed. Within a board, one can specify both the “groups” (users) that will be actively working in that board over the different phases of the project and “pulses” (tasks) that will be needing completion within a particular phase. For example, one group on HERC’s research board is “Proposal Development.” Some of the pulses listed under this group are to draft the proposal, submit the proposal for review, and submit the proposal for signature. Each of these pulses contains columns that assign responsibility, due date, and current status of the task. Although HERC has predetermined groups and pulses listed in its project template, research teams can add and remove groups that may not be relevant to their specific project. Not only can project members keep project status up to date, they can communicate with one another and even schedule meetings and upload related documents within the project board. Team members can also share this information with others outside of Monday.com by downloading selected information contained on the board into an Excel file. Another beneficial feature of Monday.com is that each HERC team member can develop a “dashboard” that allows them to see their assignments across various project boards in one place.

Within that structure, partnership members use the tool for these main purposes: 

HERC project managers (based on the research-side at Rice University) use the tool to:

• Track and address scheduling challenges within and across projects
• Establish timelines and checkpoints for each project
• Manage teams and project access
• Create portfolios and other requested reports for HERC leadership and practice-side partners

HERC research scientists and analysts at Rice use the tool to:

• Update team members on progress made on their research projects
• Track and adjust timelines as needed
• Collaboratively develop products like PowerPoint presentations and briefs that share research outcomes for each project they are assigned to
• Track reviews and revisions of these products prior to public release

HERC practice-side partners use the tool to:

• Provide feedback on drafts prior to publication
• Track specific requests from researchers

HERC leadership uses the tool to:

• Track progress on any given research project
• Connect with research scientists and analysts on outstanding to-dos or any questions
• Review and approve deliverables

Some Final Tips

To date, Monday.com has proven to be a high usage, successful collaborative tool for HERC. However, Monday.com was not an overnight success for HERC. When Monday.com was first introduced to HERC staff, user buy-in was hesitant. For RPPs searching for effective management tools, these are some lessons that we have learned in our project management journey that might be helpful:

• Spend time thinking about your top criteria in selecting a project management tool. For example, consider cost, ease of use, integration ability, and customer support to determine what will work best for your organization. Ask yourself: What do you need your tool to be able to do? How will different partnership members use your tool?  
• Thoughtfully introduce the new tool and provide sufficient training. Introducing a new tool can cause anxiety and hesitancy. It takes training, one on one meetings, and constant support and assurance from project managers that any error can be reversed to help users adopt a new tool.
• Regularly evaluate how your tool is working for your partnership. Partnerships grow and change, new management challenges and needs can arise, and project management tools themselves can also change or become stagnant in the functionalities they offer. At HERC, the metric for success for using Monday.com is tracking the rate of regular use by team members and conducting one on one meetings to discuss what is working and how we can improve.

Shauna Dunn is Senior Program Manager at the Houston Education Research Consortium.

Suggested citation: Dunn, S. (2022). Project Management in RPPs: A Look at One Partnership’s Experiences. NNERPP Extra, 4(1), 13-14.