This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:

I’m a project leader in a research organization – as in a hard core blue sky R&D future thinking lab. We loosely organize around projects but our goals are the inverse of typical software: it’s the IP and the concepts we invent that people pay us for, not feature sets or code quality. Our releases to clients are vehicles for our concepts and research, but nothing more.

What I’m looking for are ways to apply project management skills to blue-sky, big think, projects. Can we improve the quality of our process and scheduling, or get more mileage out of the concepts we invent, but with a minimum impact on our ability to experiment, change directions, and go after big powerful ideas? What do things like specs, exit criteria and status meetings mean for a 100% proof of concept project?

– Flying in the blue sky