Project Management

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Right-sizing PM practices for volatile, ever-changing projects

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Robin Mitchell Project Manager| Sandia National Laboratories Albuquerque, Nm, United States
Acknowledging upfront that we'd prefer a project scope to be somewhat stable; and might say it's "not ready" to be a project if the pendulum is swinging wildly. The realities of government funded R&D projects are that stability is very, very hard to come by, and scope is constantly shifting. So what are the best practices for acknowledging the VUCA environment and managing the ever changing work as efficiently and effectively as possible? We have to meet our sponsors where they are; we have to use practices that are flexible and enable the work to start and continue. We have to plan as we go (building the ship as we're sailing). It's hard to find books, blogs, etc that reflect this type of envrionment. Anyone else experience work like this and have favorite tools/practices you deploy?  
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Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
Robin -

This is true of any project where there is a high degree of uncertainty and/or complexity and an adaptive approach is one way to tackle these. Time or cost-boxing R&D initiatives and allowing scope to be flexible does work if there is time spent up front in defining the hypothesis (or hypotheses) which need to be tested.

Kiron
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Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina
Never, in the history of project management, things like scope are stable. The key things, no matter the approach of life cycle you are using, is to be aware of possible changes and create the actions to be ready. In the case of R&D project this is more "easy" to manage because you are funding hypothesis to be proved (as @Kiron mentioned above). The important is to send the right message to everybody.
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Thomas Walenta Global Project Economy Expert Hackenheim, Germany

Robin, not a new question, but a good one.

Here is the beginning of a research paper abstract from 1996:

A successful R&D manager is, in many ways, an agent of change. R&D managers must respond effectively to changes in domestic and global competition, product and process technologies, customer requirements, regulatory matters, and senior management's perception of the role R&D plays in a firm. The responses to these changes flow downstream from R&D to other parts of the organization, in the form of new materials, methods, processes, and products.

To help us understand the changes facing R&D management, Ashok K. Gupta and David Wilemon present the results of a study that examines the ideas and experiences of 120 R&D directors from technology-based companies. .....

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