Planning and realization control of research projects

In the paper a new approach to research projects planning and management is proposed. It is substantially different from the traditional methods and resembles more the agile methods used in IT projects. It takes into account the much more greater dimension of uncertainty inherent to research projects as compared with other types of projects. It allows a project to be broken if the analysis shows that the benefit/cost relation does no longer justify the project continuation. The focus of the method lies on an generalized tasks description, consisting of a comprehensive list of undetermined, unknown or uncertain task attributes and task dependencies, with an explanation clarifying the nature or the cause of the lack of information/uncertainty. The description should be updated in the course of the project. The proposed approach is applied to a real world research project where a lot of changes were necessary and traditional project management methods proved to be inefficient.