Here are seven tips on time management for marketing management project research directors. Manage expectations. Most job descriptions for project directors mention writing skills, facility with mathematics, organizational ability, and experience with presentations, but managing expectations may be the most critical skill to master.

If you're pretty sure that the work will be done by Thursday, don't say you're "shooting for Wednesday." You're better off promising Friday and giving yourself a chance to be a hero. Think about priorities. When the client has a crisis, sometimes you just have to drop everything and help out.

Clients are, after all, the ones paying our salaries. Even without a crisis, however, it doesn't hurt to think about your priorities. The time-management books suggest concentrating on the most important tasks only and ignoring the others until they too join the "most important" list. If you don't mind a messy desk, this is pretty good advice.

Think about leverage. What if the client is not in crisis mode, but you still have 10 things to do? Concentrate first on the tasks that require contributions from others. If the interviewers are waiting for your briefing or the data processing people are waiting for your codes, then everyone's work is backing up. Provide regular updates.

It is amazing how many games of voice-mail tag can be avoided by filling out a simple form. Set up a form that you can fax or e-mail every day explaining how many interviews have been finished, where the incidence is coming out, how you are doing on interview length, and whatever other facts your client requires. If you are working with 10 field services on a study, get them to fill out update forms too-this saves you another 10 calls a day. Be on the lookout for problems. A statistician I worked with used to say, "All lists are bad."

Actually, he used a stronger term-"the trick is to find out why this particular list is bad." Project directing is problem solving. Incidence estimates will be off, questionnaires will be too long, respondents will be uncooperative, and lists will be, uh, bad. Spending a little extra time on instructions, briefings, and safety checks today will save a lot of extra work tomorrow. When you discover a problem, let the client know quickly.

You can stick a problem in a folder for a day or two, but it's not likely to solve itself. The sooner the client hears about the problem, the sooner he or she can adjust schedules or budgets. In my experience, you can almost always go back to a client-once-to discuss changes in specifications, schedules, and budgets. But you need to bring these issues up early, when your client still has some flexibility.

Surprises at the 11th hour are both painful and time-consuming for everyone. If you need to bring up a problem, don't be afraid to suggest some solutions as well. Suggesting solutions will help to solve the issue quickly and efficiently. As a general rule, the range of possible solutions is not hard to come up with. The following should cover about 80 percent of all possible problems:

Question

1. Would you like to be a project manager? Why or why not?

2. What do you think are the most important characteristics of a good project manager?