Research Project Management Toolkit

Helps alliance managers and research PMO leads select, assign, and deploy the project management practices a collaboration will use.

What it does

University-industry research collaborations often run on whatever project management habits each side brings with it. The university works one way, the company another, and nobody agrees at the start which practices the project will actually use. Milestones drift, roles blur, and problems surface at the steering committee months after they began.

The Research Project Management Toolkit helps you decide, before the work starts, how this collaboration will be managed. It's adapted from a published framework for running large university-industry R&D programs (the PM.UIC framework of Fernandes and O'Sullivan, 2023) and from research on hybrid project management, and it sorts practices into two groups: 33 must-haves that every research collaboration should run, such as a kickoff meeting, a staffing plan, and regular progress reviews, and 30 optional practices that suit some projects and not others.

You describe your project in a short profile: budget, length, sponsor, how settled the scope is, how uncertain the science is, and which regulations apply. The toolkit recommends which optional practices fit, and flags any choice that works against your profile. It shows whether your setup leans toward a plan-driven, stage-gated approach, a balanced hybrid, or an agile-leaning hybrid that still keeps stage gates, and checks that you're ready to launch before the steering committee signs off. The finished Playbook lists every practice you'll run, with owners and dates, grouped from kickoff to closing, and ready to print and share.

Who it's for

Alliance managers, research PMO directors, sponsored programs leaders, and principal investigators setting up a multi-year sponsored project.

What's inside, sheet by sheet

• Cover and Instructions: the six-step method, how to read the recommendations, and a glossary of the acronyms both sides use.
• Project Profile: 15 short questions about the project that drive the recommendations.
• Transversal Practices: the 33 must-have practices, with space to assign an owner, start date, and status to each.
• Contingent Selector: the 30 optional practices, each with a recommendation for your project and your decision to adopt, pilot, defer or skip it.
• Selection Rules: the reasoning behind each recommendation in plain words, so your team can see why a practice was suggested and overrule it where your judgment differs.
• Recommendations: a summary of your setup, where it sits between plan-driven and agile, and a readiness check with a sign-off for the steering committee.
• Playbook: the print-ready list of every practice you'll run, with owners and dates, grouped from kickoff to closing.
• Methodology and Sample: where each practice comes from, and a worked example with every input and result.

What you need to use it

Excel or a compatible spreadsheet app, the project's budget, duration, sponsor structure, research output type and regulatory position, and names for practice owners. You profile the project once, then give each practice an owner, a start date, and a decision.

The methodology and the sources it cites

The practice list is adapted from the PM.UIC framework of Fernandes and O'Sullivan (2023), developed in a large industry-university program in Portugal, and from research on hybrid Stage-Gate and Agile approaches (Cooper, 1994 and 2014; Cooper and Sommer, 2016; Gemino, Reich and Serrador, 2021), the PMBOK Guide (8th edition, 2025) and De Backer and Rinaudo (2019). Helikon Labs applies years of practitioner experience to adapt these different practices for research collaborations, and the toolkit names the source of every practice. Fernandes et al. (2023) is cited for context on critical success factors. The selection rules and the configuration read are Helikon Labs practitioner judgment.

Where it sits in the Helikon Method

Steward phase (execution and governance), built from The Helikon Method, Project Management for Research Collaborations. Use it between signature and the first steering committee meeting, and again at the 90-day review.

Related workshop and bundle

Our Stewarding the Partnership workshop includes this toolkit. It belongs to our Execution and Governance Bundle, rolling out in batches as its tools go live.

License

Single-organization internal-use license: your organization may use it internally without seat limits, and may not resell or redistribute it.