Stewarding the Partnership: Project Management for R&D Collaborations

Who it's for

PIs leading a sponsored project and the lab managers who run it day to day, sponsored programs post-award staff who answer the sponsor's questions, corporate R&D project managers and alliance managers who own the company side of a university project, and program leads running a multi-party consortium. Both sides together is best, because the cadence and reporting agreed in the room then bind both.

The problem it fixes

Research projects run on uncertain timelines with deliverables owned by people in different organizations, and standard project management wasn't built for that, so most teams improvise: milestones drift, status lives in email, and the sponsor hears about a slip at the quarterly review. The cost is real, since PMI's Pulse of the Profession (2018) found that organizations ineffective at project management waste 21 times more money than top performers. This workshop adapts project management to research collaborations, drawing on the 29 transversal and 30 contingent practices Fernandes and O'Sullivan (2023) derived from a 54.7 million euro program of about 500 researchers, and leaves the team with a milestone plan, a cadence, and a reporting template that fit the uncertainty of scientific discovery.

Agenda

Four blocks of about 45 minutes.

• 0:00 to 0:45. Debrief of your Research Project Management Toolkit results. We review the project profile, the 33 must-have practices with the owners and start dates the team assigned, the optional practices the Fit Signal indicated, and find the gaps between what the playbook recommends and how your project is running now.
• 0:45 to 1:30. Milestones under uncertainty. We separate decision milestones from delivery milestones, set go, hold and recycle criteria at each gate, and build the plan around the experiments that could change its direction.
• 1:30 to 2:15. Cadence and escalation. Who meets at what rhythm, what each meeting decides, and how a slipped milestone is escalated. Our default is one week to project leads, four weeks to the steering committee, and eight weeks to executives, adjusted to your project.
• 2:15 to 3:00. Reporting, publication, and IP. A sponsor report the company's leadership will read, and a disclosure-and-review calendar that lets the lab publish and the company file, built against the project's milestones rather than each other.

What you bring

• Your completed Research Project Management Toolkit for one existing project
• The project's current plan, however informal, and the last two status reports
• The PI, the sponsor's technical lead, and whoever answers to the steering committee

What you leave with

• A milestone plan with decision gates and go, hold, and recycle criteria
• A meeting cadence by role and a one-page escalation path
• A sponsor reporting template filled in once for your project
• A publication and IP disclosure calendar for the next 12 months

Included instrument and pre-work

The Research Project Management Toolkit is issued at booking and completed two weeks before the session for the project the team is bringing, so the first block works from your results, not a sample. The toolkit configures the project's hybrid methodology from its profile: an owner and a start date for each of the 33 must-have practices, and which of the 30 optional practices the project's profile indicates. The session turns that playbook into the milestone plan, the cadence, and the reporting template, with the people who will use them. Our plain guide to managing a university-industry research collaboration covers the same ground at length, and the free governance charter template is the companion if the steering committee hasn't yet been chartered.

Logistics

Capped at 12 participants: J. Richard Hackman's team research found that coordination and candor erode once a working group climbs into the double digits (Hackman, interviewed in Harvard Business Review, 2009), and a working session needs everyone contributing, so larger teams add breakouts or split into additional sessions. Virtual by default, onsite available with travel billed at cost at federal per-diem rates. Series pricing is 15% off three or more workshops. We schedule within one business day of booking.

Frequently asked questions

Can we run it for a mixed university and company group?

Yes, and it can be even more effective this way. Both sides hear the same debrief in one room, see where their results already differ, and make decisions that would otherwise take months of meetings.

What if we already own the tool?

The instrument's price is not deducted from the workshop fee. We use your existing results as the pre-work, and you keep the second license for a second team or partnership.

Is this legal advice?

No. This is project management and governance design: milestones, cadence, reporting and escalation. Helikon Labs is not a law firm and this is not legal advice. Where the publication and IP calendar affects your agreement's review periods, we prepare the questions for your counsel rather than replace them.