3 Ways to Successfully Manage Large-Scale R&D Projects

In project management, challenges tend to grow as projects — especially those centered on research and development — extend over time. It becomes harder to manage deadlines and allocate resources over lengthy horizons. The most popular method for managing projects flexibly, known as agile, struggles when applied to extended ventures. This is mainly because long-running innovative endeavors, such as skunkworks, often lack regular feedback from end-users, which is essential for the agile approach.

But that’s not to say innovation projects can’t be managed effectively. We recently unveiled a large build at Lattice, the HR software startup where I am the general manager, at the same time as we updated our existing product line.

Below are three instrumental factors that helped us get it right.

Securing Executive Mandate

Large builds are naturally riskier than smaller, step-by-step approaches. So, it’s crucial that the company’s leaders understand and accept this risk early on. Where a small project can validate market appetite along the way, larger projects incur significant R&D costs in advance of meaningful signal from prospective buyers. If the executive commitment falters during this period, the risk to the project is existential.

It’s common for projects to negotiate goals and metrics for success from the start. However, with large-scale projects, it’s beneficial to predict specific future profits and expenses. By collaborating with a financial expert, teams can create several plans for staffing and resourcing based on varying conditions. This way, they can adjust their budget more flexibly, always staying within a pre-agreed spending range.

Once a range of possible futures has been sketched out this can be tied to proposed timelines, with the upper band of spending representing the maximum amount of resources that can be productively applied to the project, and the lower band representing the minimum amount of resources needed to make reasonable forward progress. As the project evolves, this gives company and project leadership a shared framework for controlling risk on these big projects that isn’t simply an on/off switch.

Setting Expectations

When it comes to research and development projects that have public deadlines, estimating the time and effort needed can be tricky. A common challenge is that often the last part of the project can be the most time-consuming. The final detail can often take up the majority of the effort. Furthermore, as the project progresses, the understanding of what needs to be done can change. Even the best project managers, who try to predict these challenges, may need to adjust deadlines during the project.

To address this, it’s useful to adopt a habit of communicating delivery dates as a range rather than a fixed point in time. For us, this was communicated as a pair of dates: a target date and a commit date. The target date is what we think we can reasonably accomplish based on the current understanding of the work. The commit date is the time at which we should throw a flag and say something isn’t going right.

Estimating in this manner is important because everyone already knows that a good project manager will pad their estimates, but if those discounts are opaque then other parties for whom the work is a dependency will try and figure out what the “real date” is to plan their own work. Making the discounting transparent improves these communication lines, and helps ensure the scheduling of any related work can happen with a clearer understanding of the inherent timeline risk at play.

Expectation management with the team is equally important, especially with large projects that experience a lot of change during the build, due to the fact that there is often a lot of ongoing discovery overlaid with the build process. One of the refrains during our recent build was “we’re going to build a lot of stuff and we’re going to throw some of it away, and that’s okay.” Yes, there was an end goal we were aiming at, but our success was more about the number of things we tried and the breadth of what we learned – particularly during the first half of the build.

There is a (perhaps apocryphal) quote from Thomas Edison as he was trying to find the right material for lightbulb filament: “I never once failed at making a lightbulb. I just found 99 ways not to make one.” This pro-experimentation bias orients the success narrative around learning and improvement (vs, say, efficiency), helping keep team morale high.

Owning the Outcome

For long-term research and development projects, it’s essential that the person in charge truly owns the project’s results. While this may sound like a matter of principle, in reality, it’s about practicality: Teams perform at their best when they can focus on the task at hand, without being distracted by the politics of potential risks.

When the person leading the project steps up to take responsibility for the tough choices, the ensuing psychological safety lifts a weight off the team. Often, teams hesitate in decision-making, fearing the consequences if things don’t pan out. This caution can result in overly safe strategies or decisions getting stuck in endless committee discussions.

But a project manager who says, “Give me your best recommendation, and we’ll follow through. If issues arise, I’ll take responsibility and we’ll navigate them together,” ensures the team stays on track, dedicated, and free from unnecessary hold-ups. Leaders would do well to foster a blame-free environment crucial to embedding a psyche of boldness and proprietorship among project leads, which cascades down to all team levels, spurring innovation, efficacy, and a wholesome approach to tackling project challenges and uncertainties.

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Project management, especially in larger, long-term R&D projects, requires a combination of leadership commitment, clear communication, and the courage to own outcomes. Our journey at Lattice taught us that success doesn’t solely lie in meticulous planning or perfect execution; it rests on trust, transparency, and adaptability. Keeping these principles at the heart of your project management approach will empower teams to tackle even the most daunting challenges with confidence and resilience.

Copyright 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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