Too Many Laboratory Informatics Experts

On our laboratory informatics projects, I tend to find that customers are: A) Afraid to have too many experts, thinking they’ll contradict each other and fight; B) Think having a lot of experts mean they’ll get a great end-product with no intervention; C) Know that both (A) and (B) are both partly true and partly false.

What brings this up is that I was just having this very conversation with another expert just a couple days ago. He was noting that our project had both quite a lot of experts AND quite a good team, where people worked together, wanted to work well together, and got a lot done and at a high-level. We got into a discussion how that is not the case with many of the other projects we have worked-on.

Aggressive Experts

Whether or not you’re specifically putting pressure on your experts, people who are experts know from their past that there’s a lot of pressure on them to show that they’re experts, provide expertise, be forceful about it, and show why they are worth so much more money than those who are not experts. As such, getting a group of experts together can turn into a chest-beating contest, depending on the personalities involved. Sometimes, the software vendor is competing for the project with another services vendor and there might be several companies working on the project competing for the customer’s dollars. They might feel the need to out-do each other rather than working together. Unfortunately, when experts continue to contradict each other and try to out-position each other, the customer is paying for that wasted time. It is not helping the project.

Cooperative Experts

On the other hand, when experts can work cooperatively, the amount of problems they can collectively solve is so amazing, a customer who has experienced this will be astounded at the amount of problems that will be solved, the short amount of time to work-out the details, and the high quality of those solutions. This requires not only experts who have the right personalities for this, but some guidance from the customer. It is always the customer who must set the stage for the collaborative setting. Even when the customer uses an external project manager to do this, the customer must still show a great deal of support for the collaborative situation over the competitive one and must make it clear that that is what is required. The customer must be prepared to resolve conflicts where people refuse or are unable to work collaboratively, sometimes getting the external companies involved to get their people in-line with the project.

One More Issue

Another issue is that some projects hire a single person to be the royal being on the project, responsible for every bit of brain-cell activity on the project, where all others are their serfs, who are not allowed to think or add their own experiences, but only to take direction. This works fine when that person either truly has all the answers or the project is willing to accept a mediocre (but working) solution. However, where this presents the greatest challenge is that any team member with any amount of experience will be bored out of their skull on this type of project. This type of project discourages other team members from thinking or growing.

In a bizarre twist, one project I worked on hired several junior people to make the project decisions and a large group of experts to be the “serfs.” Needless to say, this project not only took MUCH longer than it should have, but was filled with unhappiness and strife for all involved.

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/