Useful Project Management Practices in Collaborative R&D&I Projects

Collaborative Research and Development and Innovation (R&D&I) projects make an essential contribution to the development of knowledge-based, innovative products, processes, and services. The main objective of this paper is to gain a comprehensive understanding of project management (PM) in collaborative R&D&I projects, examining the usefulness of PM practices. The results are based on 465 valid responses from an online questionnaire survey on the perceptions of collaborative R&D&I project practitioners. The Relative Importance Index was used to classify the usefulness of the 35 key PM practices surveyed. The top 10 rank of the most useful PM practices cover the entire PM lifecycle and include well-known practices, such as ‘kick-off meeting’, ‘progress meetings’, ‘Gantt chart’, ‘project closure report’, ‘project closure meeting’, ‘milestone list’, ‘requirement analysis’ and ‘project scope plan’. Although, there are also less emphasised PM practices such as ‘alignment workshops’ and ‘project idea paper’. The paper contributes to supporting practitioners to decide which PM practices should be prioritised and implemented.
The authors are grateful to the Portuguese Innovation Agency (ANI) and the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal) for financial support through POAT2020, PORTUGAL2020, European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) to CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020 and UIDP/00690/2020), SusTEC (LA/P/0007/2021), ARISE (LA/P/0112/2020), ALGORITMI (UIDB/00319/2020), and CEMMPRE (UIDB/00285/2020).
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion