R&D Projects

Anonymous

I have switched gears in my organization and moved from managing implementation projects to managing research and development projects. Are there any good sources or books regarding the management of R&D projects?

Posted: Aug 13, 2001 1:19 PM

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Eileen Bazin Rochester, Ny, United States

That's a good question - I'd like to find material in that subject area too.

One of the ideas I keep hanging on to (be it right or wrong)is the notion that an R&D project has (generally) two results: 1) the R&D effort has 'disproven' an idea/concept; or 2) the R&D has proven the idea/concept and it will move into a more traditional "implementation" project. In the second case, I think that the R&D work is really a "phase" of the project. Add to this my personal bias to look at software development methodology as symbiotic with project management methodology. So this led me to investigate some of the more familiar SD methodologies instead of looking at something more revolutionary.

I've been looking at the spiral development methodology. After reading some of Barry Boehm's work (a bunch of papers are available on the web) I started to see some similarities or benefits of the Spiral method for pure R&D initiatives - at least within my organization. Our R&D efforts will, optimally, result in a viable prototype that an implementation type project would "perfect" then release. So I'm now looking at the use of spiral to get through the R&D activities while merging with other methodologies for implementation.

I am also continuing my search for something more enlightened than my fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants approach.
I will check in to this discussion to see if anyone else posts, and I'll post to this topic when I find something more.

Posted: Aug 22, 2001 5:26 AM

Frank Patrick Boonton, Nj, United States

One of the characteristics of R&D "discovery-type" projects is the "trial-and-error" aspect of "design-build-test-redesign-rebuild-retest" iterations. If this sounds familiar, you might find the Critical Chain methodology useful.

Most of the writing on the approach has discussed its use of buffers to account for variability inherent in individual tasks. Buffers are also useful as a time repository for "iteration variabilty." You don't want to promise a project based on what it could take (5 iterations), but you also don't want to promise it based on getting lucky (1-2 iterations). Using buffers to help account for the other possible 3 iterations is an "schedule-efficient" way of addressing this issue.
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Posted: Aug 22, 2001 7:18 AM

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