The R&D project manager

One of the most difficult tasks in any organization is the management of R&D activities.

These R&D activities are usually headed up by architects, developers, managers, and even executives. All of these people, at one time or another, may act as R&D project managers.

R&D project requires:

Research and development (R&D) include activities that companies undertake to innovate and introduce new products and services.

It is often the first stage in the development process.

The goal is typically to take new products and services to market and add to the company's bottom line.

R&D personnel were probably the first true project managers in the world.

Problems faced by R&D project manager:

    1) achieve an objective but lack of clear goals

    2) budget constraints

    3) resource constraints

    4) tight schedule and unrealistic timeline

Management Technique used by project manager for executing the R&D project:

Need to ask below questions for identifying R& Project:

• What are the objectives of the project?
• What is new about this project?
• What methods are being used to carry out the project?
• How generally applicable are the findings or results of the project?
• What types of staff are working on the project?
• How should the research projects are classified?

R&D project often involves managing usability, operability, reliability, maintainability and serviceability of the result product and the entry-exit criteria and their fulfillment for each sub-process in the total development process. 

The required level of usability, operability, reliability, maintainability and serviceability needs to be specified upfront in the product requirements to be built-in the product.

The development process control needs to be specified in the project requirements or methodology.