Research management: some tips and resources
I’m often asked for tips on managing research projects and researchers – here are some tips, templates, and resources.
Planning a research project
The beginning of every research project can be quite daunting. It’s much less so if you have a plan! The most important parts of a research plan in my opinion include (in a policy context):
Path to impact: what impact in the real world do you want to accomplish? Who is your target audience?
Resources: who will work on the project? What’s your timeline? What methods will you use?
Audience engagement plan: how will you ensure your research reaches your target audience?
Failure modes: in which ways might your project go wrong? What can you do now to mitigate these potential issues?
To-dos: list your next steps as concretely as you can. Include a list of people you will reach out to for feedback later on.
The goal isn’t to have a perfect plan (and you’ll likely stop looking at this plan later into the project), but to get you to scope your project in an organized way and help you have a clearer sense of how to tackle it. As the saying goes, plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable.
Here’s a template I use to get you started: bit.ly/researchplantemplate
Speedrunning a research idea
One strategy to get your research off the ground is to do a “speedrun”: a short (usually 5-15h) structured research project aiming to produce a bottom line on a specific question and an output you can share with others.
The best research outputs are iterative processes: the researcher writes down something, gets feedback from peers, refines their output, and repeats the cycle until they have a polished product (or reaches their deadline). It’s very rare that good research happens in a vacuum with a researcher immediately jotting down brilliant ideas onto blank pages – but working in isolation for too long is a common failure mode among researchers. Try a speedrun to prevent it!
Here’s a workshop I gave for Bay Area researchers on research speedruns in 2024 with some tips and exercises: bit.ly/researchspeedrun
(Credit to Marie Buhl for preparing the original slides for this workshop.)
Managing a researcher (and being managed)
Most researchers have a supervisor, mentor, or manager. This is a very important relationship that has the potential of accelerating a researcher’s trajectory and multiplying the manager’s impact. But it’s often treated as a bureaucratic, unproductive hassle.
I think this relationship should be treated with the utmost care. For this, I like having some structure, thought, and preparation imprinted on it, and use templates for my weekly and monthly meetings with my managees: bit.ly/weekly1-1 and bit.ly/monthlystepback.
(Many aspects of these templates have been developed by Michael Aird and Peter Wildeford, research managers I’ve had the luck to work with.)