Welcome to the APM podcast. APM is the childhood body for
the project profession. My name is Emma DaVita and I'm
the editor of Project APM's quarterly journal and your host
this podcast. I'm speaking to Doctor Miranda
Lowe, Director of Scientific Growth, Engagement and
Innovation at the Institute of Occupational Medicine.
For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the Institute
of Occupational Medicine is dedicated to enhancing health in
workplaces in the broader environment.
Comprising engineers, hygienists, analysts,
scientists, and ventilation experts, its work spans the
entire life cycle of hazards and airborne exposures, offering
comprehensive insights from identification to management,
testing, and legal support. Notable achievements include
ground breaking research on coal miner lung disease, developing a
handheld dust sampler and assessing the health impact of
the Montserrat volcano. Miranda herself develops the
Institute's research capabilities and hazardous
substances exposure assessment, health and well-being at work,
and Air pollution in the built Environment's impact on human
exposure and health. While not formally qualified in
project management, Miranda is a self confessed big fan of
project management and takes a formal approach to managing all
in house projects. Listen on to find out how
project management can bring value to new sectors and how
project management can be introduced to an organisation
not formally familiar with it. Welcome, Miranda.
Thanks for joining us on the APM.
Podcast, thank you for having me.
Why don't we start by you telling us a little bit about
the IOM? Sure.
So the IOM stands for the Institute of Occupational
Medicine and we were started by the National Coal Board in order
to study the health effects of coal mining on workers.
Obviously we don't have the National Coal Board anymore and
we have, we became a charity. The purpose of the charity was
to do research as well as education and promoting
information to enable the protection of workers health in
the UK. Before you tell us a bit about
your current role, do you want to tell me about your career
journey? How you ended up at the IOM?
My backgrounds as an exposure scientist, so that's somebody
who studies and characterises environmental hazards that
people are exposed to and how they come into contact with
these hazards. And the purpose of that is to
better understand the health impacts they may have, but also
to look at how we can potentially assess their risks
as well as mitigation measures or interventions.
Originally, my focus is primarily on contaminants in the
air, both in the workplace and other environments such as
indoor air. And before the IOM, after
Graduate School, I spent some time in various organisations.
I worked in Finland, and then I worked in Arizona as an
assistant professor. And then I came to the IOM after
that. And that was just over 10 years
ago. So I started here as a senior
scientist. Tell me a bit about your current
role and your the research you're working on at the moment.
So I'm the Director of Scientific Growth, Engagement
and Innovation. It is a leadership position.
So I'm one of the directors and I'm responsible specifically for
overseeing our sharing of our insights and influence on
occupational environmental health issues to our
stakeholders and also for planning the growth of our
organisation. I think it would be helpful for
people to understand a bit more about occupational medicine as
discipline and exactly what kind of thing it encompasses, because
I think this might be directly relevant to many of our
listeners who work across construction and architecture
and all kinds of different environments.
So it'd be good to understand a bit better what that covers.
Occupational medicine is actually more traditionally
focused on the impacts of health from work and sometimes there
are different terms that are used around here.
Occupational health is another one.
Medicine, I guess if you think about it, is a bit more on the
the medical side of things, looking at the clinical side.
And so this would be looking at afflictions that might result
from work, such as injuries or repetitive stress injuries.
There are things like in certain industries, you might want to be
aware of things like allergies to certain substances, but also
things like burnout and more psychosocial risks are part of
that. You know, mental illness is one
of the top causes of ill health at work these days.
So obviously we're moving away from being a primarily
industrial society where things like respiratory disease and and
diseases that arise from chemical explosions and things
like that, while they still exist, they are not as prevalent
probably as they have been historically.
So obviously we don't have as much coal mining anymore.
So things like pneumoconiosis from coal dust is less of an
issue now than it used to be, but there are then other things
and a lot of them tend to be musculoskeletal disorders as
well as mental health related illnesses.
What specifically within mental health is the Institute
exploring, researching or providing insights on at the
moment? So we have in the past and we do
today also look at things like work related stress.
So we've done various things like evidence reviews around
that area. We've also looked at the impact
of of things like technology on health, things like mobile
technology. We've done some projects around
those. Again, it's one of the key
stressors. And, and when we think about
workplace stressors that, you know, I use the term stressor is
a term that's used sometimes in environmental health to refer to
things like physical stressors, biological, chemical as well.
So psychosocial. So those are all the different
things that potentially a worker may be exposed to at their
workplace. And obviously the, the
importance of them depends on the type of workplace that
they're at. But I think we can probably
agree that at most workplaces, whether it is manufacturing,
whether it's construction, whether it is an office job,
some element of managing stress is important for that.
Is it all the obvious stuff around stress and avoiding
burnout that you give advice to individuals to follow, or do you
also consult with organisations and companies themselves about
how to handle this better? So in our organisation we do
research but we also do service provision.
Our service provision has been focused more on assessing things
like chemical hazards at work or things like noise, vibration
etcetera. The stress related well-being
work that we've done has primarily been more in the
research or evidence review sort of building the evidence base
for that. One of the things we recognise
is there is an importance of looking more holistically at
worker health, so it isn't just a matter of managing the
physical risks set at work, but also looking across at how work
is organised and how that might also influence worker
well-being. So that is something that we're
looking to build more not just in our research side, but also
our services side, Which. Other workplace safety projects
are you particularly interested in at the moment or concerned
with working on? We have quite a wide range of
different types of services we provide and and some of it in
what we call our science Insights and Influence group,
which does a lot of the research work, is looking at providing
the evidence base to help policy and decision makers make more
informed actions to protect worker and public health.
So as an example, we have done work with the likes of what used
to be called PhD Public Health England, which is now the UK
Health Security Agency. We've done work with Defra.
We'd also do work obviously with private clients, which I can't
really share as much about. So a lot of those work.
So services work then tends to be more around, although some of
our research work also does that, is to assess levels of
exposures that workers might face at work and then help them
manage those risks. We also do quite a lot of work
with hospitals. So in particular we do work
around helping them ensure that they have healthy air quality,
which is very important, as you can imagine, hospitals.
And this is through adequate monitoring of the air and
ventilation systems and helping them ensure that they're meeting
the guidelines that they need to.
As I mentioned, we do a lot of work with different government
and European agencies. So we review evidence and
develop or update guidance. And this can be for various
hazards such as as an example, we've done some work around
cytotoxic, medical, medicinal products, nanomaterials,
asbestos, various other types of hazards like that.
Something that's quite for me that I've worked on quite a lot
over the last few years is around looking at sensing
technologies and applying those in occupational settings.
So as I mentioned before, my background is primarily in air
quality and so there has been quite a lot of interest and
implementation of what we call lower cost air quality sensors,
which when I started work at IOMI think this was only
starting to be something that's come on the market.
It really changed how we we measure air quality.
You know, before it was primarily these government
regulatory air stations around air monitoring stations.
And therefore we didn't have a lot of data.
It was only in certain areas. But then these lower cost
sensors came on the market and they were things that the
average consumer could buy. So you could buy one, I could
buy one online and then measure their quality in our our
backyard or in our homes. And so that is now something
actually that I see the government's local councils even
implementing to supplement what they have for regulatory
purposes. So what one of the things that
interests me is translating that type of technology also to
looking at managing occupational exposures.
If I were to ask you what are the biggest threats to workers
health in the UK at the moment, what would be up there?
So we looked at what the HSC statistics, it does say
musculoskeletal disorders as well as mental health are the
top 2 workplace illnesses that are prevalent in the UK.
Respiratory 1 diseases or illnesses are kind of still an
issue, but they're much smaller compared to those two.
And and cancer due to workplace exposures is another one, but
that's again relatively small and and that tends to be a bit
more because cancer is a long latency disease that's something
that doesn't show up till many years after.
I know you're clearly motivated by public service and you have
an interest in health, so I wondered what you hoped to
achieve in your work at the institute.
I don't know if we really underestimate the impact of work
on our health because it has an impact not just on our health
today while we're working. And I think, you know, there is
a fair amount of awareness of workplace health issues,
especially around stress and things like that.
But so our health today impacts our health tomorrow, meaning
when we retire, how healthy we are is set by the times before
we retire. So I think it's important to
lead a healthy working life in the hope that we can also be
healthy when we're no longer working.
And so for me in the institute, I hope that we can help both
decision makers, policy makers in the government, but also
clients and organisations take an approach in their work that
that incorporates employee health and well-being.
And part of that is in a lot of what we do is around the
environment of work, whether that be the physical
infrastructure, the processes that people do at work that may
lead to them being exposed to hazards, but also the workplace
culture and practises that support their mental health and
well-being as well. When you think about the best
workplaces from your point of view, so the ones that want to
have a healthy workforce, what do you see that they do?
I mean, I think to be honest, it doesn't really matter the type
of workplace. I think leadership is really
important in setting the culture around having a healthy
workplace, healthy and happy workplace.
It is leadership and culture that is the primary thing
because to me then your practises stem from that and
that that is a very important thing.
It's not the only thing, but I think it is a very important
thing. So as a leader as well, living
by example. Living by example, setting up
the organisation such that there are the support mechanisms
there. Line managers are very important
also because they are, you know, the, the, your senior leadership
is not on the ground necessarily, but it is there,
you know, having the, the right structure and the right
training. And for your line managers to be
able to recognise when there are issues in the workplace or, you
know, to, to have a culture such that people feel comfortable
speaking to their line managers about issues they may have.
And a lot of things, things that happen outside of work impact
our health is work as well. So it's not a, a fine, it's not
a, a clear line between work and outside your life outside of
work. So I think that at IOM, for
example, I think we're very much cognizant that any issues
someone might have at work isn't necessarily only impacted at
work, or it may come from something that's happened
outside of working their personal lives.
And we want to create that safe space that they feel that they
can speak to to people, others at work about this, especially
their line managers, and that, you know, appropriate actions
can be taken or adjustments can be made as needed.
So I think that is an important aspect.
We can't solve everything, but I think we can try to create a
workplace where you can, as much as possible, enable your workers
to do their best. We're APM, the only chartered
membership organisation for the project profession.
When you become an APM member, you'll receive the resources and
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Find out how we can help you reach your potential by visiting
apm.org.uk. Because when projects succeed,
society benefits. I want to turn our conversation
towards project management. I wonder how you first came
across project management and what has been your experience of
the project profession in your career so far?
So I've never actually had any formal training and project
management, but I have worked on projects most of my professional
life. And I think to some extent all
projects follow this. You know, they follow a plan,
you've got a Gantt chart with your timelines and your
deliverables and milestones and things like that.
And that is, you know, supposed to keep you on track.
So that was my experience, I would say before coming to the
IOM and it was still my experience probably through a
good part of my career here. We obviously did project
management, but I wasn't really very knowledgeable about the
methodologies until actually I transitioned into my current
position a couple of years ago. So I went on a couple leadership
courses and that was brought up and then I learned more about
waterfall and agile project management methods.
So broadly speaking, I think that's how I came into it.
Then now that I understand that there are kind of methodologies
around that and different approaches to it, I, you know, I
see the value of it. With the in house projects you
have, do you take a formal project management approach
towards? Them, yes, the scientific
projects we have, we do track them and obviously we we have
deliverables that are due at certain points.
And often times that's also driven by our clients or funding
sources because we will have to report to them on a regular
basis and therefore they will want to know things about any
risks if we're behind. Are there any things that are
flagged up for being delays or or issues with not being able to
meet certain project outputs, that kind of thing?
We have an internal management process in terms of tracking the
projects and reviewing them, etcetera.
We're now actually doing a little bit of a review as part
of our continuous improvement to see if we can, you know, make
the process a bit more efficient.
And we've had a couple people go on do like project management
apprenticeships. So that's been quite helpful
where I've taken it on and my team.
So I have a new team now which is the growth and innovation
team. And what I find actually one of
the things we maybe suffered from a little bit before is so
outside of those more formal projects where we we delivered
to clients or funders, there are things like internal projects
and they didn't really go anywhere sometimes.
And I think really why that was, we didn't have it set up like a
project, right? So there wasn't, there is no
mechanism for accountability necessarily, which I think
project management gives you. So it's clearly defining what
the project is at the beginning, then being able to, you know,
break it down into your tasks, your deliverables, your
milestones and and setting those timelines and assigning clear
roles and responsibilities and then making sure you use that
plan and check in on those, the progress of those things
regularly. That is something that I do a
lot more now with my team and I think that has really helped
move certain things forward, which I think in the past, you
know, has just been going on, but not really ever ending.
And so now, you know, I just use that approach and part and a big
part of that's the communication.
Well, I've also realised it's not enough just to set up, you
know, your plans and all that stuff.
You have to have a way of tracking it.
So we now use a planner kind of this Kanban board style planner
that can go over at our team meetings.
And when I have 1:00 to 1 so team members and I am much more
clear about what needs to be then delivered the next time we
meet or what I expect and things like that.
I mean, it's not perfect, but this really helps a lot.
And I just think having the framework and the tools that you
use for, for project management is really helpful with that, for
that, but also being able to adapt those according to the
situation rather than the one-size-fits-all methodology, I
think is quite important. It's interesting just as
anecdotally, you know, so somebody that works for me, we
were going over, he's setting a plan for, for some work.
And I was following a bit of a, a template, I presume from his
project management training. And I kind of was like, the
template's really good because it gives, these are things you
must consider. But at the same time, I think
there's an importance to not just follow the template and
fill it in, but to really think about the, you know, the
connectivity between the different parts and to be clear
about what the overarching goals are before you really set them.
You know specific aims, objectives and then the
supporting actions. And it's actually, it's exactly
what we do in proposals, especially scientific proposals
for large projects. The funny thing for me is I've
never thought about that as a project management thing, but I
spent a lot of my time writing proposals for scientific
projects. So we do it anyway.
It's just we don't do it in the way, I guess the field of
project management necessarily. We probably use those tools, but
we don't necessarily say we're following this methodology.
If there were people listening to this who were in an
organisation where project management isn't at the core of
the organisation, or people have come across it somewhere else
and perhaps they brought it in, have you got any advice about
how to start to bring project management into an organisation?
The biggest thing for us is being disciplined about applying
it. To me, a lot of it is discipline
and the managers making sure they hold the teams accountable
to the targets that are set in that plan, but also being
supportive of them. And also making sure that the
teams adequately communicate to you as a manager and that you
will do the same to them. And, and clarity and, and being
clear, knowing what you need from them and being able to
communicate that to them is really important.
So in terms of bringing it in, I think to some extent it is
probably intuitive, I would think, but it's hard for me to
say. But I think it is worthwhile
probably learning a little bit more about the different
methodologies and what is suitable for your type of
organisation. And for example, that different
types of projects may need different approaches.
So I don't think actually a course is a bad idea.
So once you've had some experience of project
management, are you then kind of converted because of the
benefits it brings, do you think?
Yes, I want more of that. I think so.
I mean, I think that the trick for me coming from a small
organisation is you have to look at your organisation, whether it
is that you have people who are project managers and that's
their job only, or do you train up some of your technical staff
to have those skills. So for us, I think we wouldn't
have the resource for having, you know, lots of project
managers, but there's probably a balance between having kind of a
smaller number of people who can help do the project management,
but then also to upskill some of our technical staff who work on
projects to be able to follow that as well.
Was there anything you wanted to add about project management?
For someone who's not, I never thought of myself as a
particularly well organised person, but but I actually think
I'm pretty decent now. And it's because you have to be.
And I think it's really about organisation, time management
and prioritisation. And I think for me project
management has helped me. It's not the only thing, but it
is one of those things that's helped me be able to do that.
And I think it is really crucial, especially for somebody
who is a leader, to be able to have those tools or at least
understand the concepts of them to help manage the team and to
because my job is to make sure people get things done and, and
I think these tools do help with that.
Miranda, it's been really lovely speaking to you.
Thank you so much. Thanks again to Miranda for
joining us and to you for listening to the APM Podcast.
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