Project Management for R&D and Innovation
Paper Title:
Project Management for R&D and Innovation
Abstract:
Research and development (R&D) efforts differ from traditional projects in a number of ways. The outcome of the project and the steps to get there may be ill-defined, visionary, or even un-achievable. The desired result of R&D may be increased knowledge, a design or prototype, or a new product, and different stakeholders may have fundamentally different visions of the what form that result shoulkd take. As a result of these characteristics, scope and risk have to be considered differently in research and development than in traditional projects. Similar considerations hold true for other aspects of R&D including personnel, schedule, budget and stakeholder management. These characteristics make R&D a distinctive kind of project, and success requires techniques which are distinctly different from traditional project management. This paper presents an R&D Project Management methodology honed over years of real-world experience, and presents ideas that can be useful in more typical projects as well.
PMI Talent Triangle Skill: Technical Project Management
