Planning and streamlining innovation

The role of innovation and research in any company is paramount to growth and the teasing out of new ideas in order to drive progress. As research and development budgets grow in tandem with Ireland’s economic recovery, working out how best to manage different strands becomes vital.

It’s in this area of R&D that project management becomes vital in ensuring different segments are weighted correctly to ensure their speedy progress.

"In project management, something must have a beginning, a middle and an end. So in relation to project management and something new, like setting up a research facility, project management becomes the method by which the new facility is set up and the process of selecting from a variety of new ideas in terms of how to plan the R&D facility," says Niall Murphy, Project Management Institute of Ireland president.

“A project manager overseeing R&D will take certain ideas and manage those concepts through certain steps to completion, which will be a company’s output. In R&D this is bringing new ideas to fruition.

“This can be applied broadly to business: companies that are attempting to introduce new product lines; third-level colleges planning new courses; or State organisations organising tax credits or other legal or financial sides.”

The core principles of putting in place these structures are done through a variety of methodologies, with personnel selection pivotal to making sure these are applied correctly.

“The next step is following properly established project-management methodology,” continues Murphy. “The best way to do that is to have certified project managers. The appointed project manager then picks and chooses between different types of project management methodologies that are most useful for the project or company in question.

“An experienced project manager will be skilled at picking what methodologies work best for different companies – a horses-for-courses approach – that will work best for the R&D project in hand. So, investing in the right people, with the right project-management skills is vital, regardless of the industry or sector, that is always the key element of the initial steps.”

Obstacles are inevitable

Within all planning, obstacles are inevitable, and putting in place silos, which can be followed in order to reach different end results, forms a vital part of project management in R&D, says Keith Finglas, managing director of management consultants Innovation Delivery: “Generally speaking, you have core elements to the business that can be managed with skills that one already possesses. Secondly, there are new skills or new equipment that will have certain elements of change about them. Then there are disruptive elements to a business and these represent a complete jump to a business. You need to look at those three areas ahead of time and manage them separately.

“Finance budgets for these three areas should be kept completely separate. If this approach isn’t taken, then at a finance meeting if a core project is discussed with another element of R&D that is a bit riskier, inevitably people go with the core project. Then all the riskier fringe projects get dropped. By keeping three separate buckets going – the continuous core central projects in one; the adjacent projects in another; and then the radical projects completely kept apart – one can protect each against obstacles separately and makes sure each bucket is doing the right thing.”

While Ireland would be regarded as one of the best-in-class in project management worldwide, the need to look outward and abroad in terms of analysing how elements of project-management techniques are applied elsewhere is also another core element of R&D.

"There are a lot of organisations based in Ireland that deliver project management to a very high level, like Intel, Siemens and Microsoft, but the interesting thing is that a lot of project management in Ireland is done on operational levels; in Ireland we're trying to bring in new innovation project-management techniques from abroad," continues Finglas.

“This type of project management is very different to standard project management techniques. Innovation techniques are based mostly around stories, around listening to people and trying to understand what’s important to them. This involves getting out from the desk and spending time on other sites. Previously, Irish project managers have been quite wary about that. Changing that attitude has been the biggest learning around project management and innovation that’s come up in the last 10 to 15 years.”