Managing Your SBIR/STTR Grant Project
A Project Management Primer for New SBIR/STTR Grant Recipients
You’re an expert in your field with a strong research background exploring the commercialization opportunities for your research-backed medical technology innovation. Although you’re adept at managing your own personal resources, orchestrating an entire project of various stakeholders might be new to you. Welcome to your new role as Project Manager! If terms like agile, waterfall, scrum, lean, PMBOK, or Kanban are unfamiliar to you, worry not. Your SBIR/STTR application and project will not require expert-level project plans with elaborate tools and processes. Instead, a foundational understanding of project management will help you craft a compelling grant application and competently manage a funded project. This post offers our insights into basic project management so that you can keep focused on what matters to you most; successfully developing your medical innovation.
Stages of Project Management
Project management involves systematically planning and executing projects to align and allocate your resources. While various project management frameworks identify distinct stages, let's simplify them into four main periods: Planning, Executing, Reviewing, Closing.
Planning
This should overlap with the timelines and milestones portion of your SBIR/STTR grant application. You will be identifying the necessary tasks to complete your project and laying out a plausible initial timeline for these tasks. Pay particular attention to any task that depends on the completion of other tasks to avoid inadvertently planning in delays or obstacles. It is also wise to plan for an initial Review Stage early in your initial project plan.
Executing
The planned work gets done during this stage. Keys to successful execution include establishing clear expectations for success as well as establishing responsibilities for task completion. With a small team like yours, it is likely that each person will be responsible for various tasks throughout your project execution. Make sure that these workloads are appropriate, and the personnel assigned have the skills to complete the tasks.
Reviewing
Consider this to be both a quality control and quality improvement stage. Here you will want to not just review the work that has been completed, but meaningfully evaluate the processes being used to accomplish tasks, the responsibilities each person has, providing supportive feedback to improve quality, and take stock of the direction the project is currently moving. As a result of a successful Review Stage, you should notice some change to your initial plans and resource allocations. Update your plan and make sure to periodically include a Reviewing Stage after another period of execution.
Closing
This marks the completion of your project; congratulations! Many teams get caught up celebrating the completion of their project that they forget to truly close it out. This is a great opportunity to document the lessons you learned while completing your project. Future plans, task identification, resource allocations, and how-to documentation are generated here making future project plans more refined and valuable. It will also help when you follow up your SBIR/STTR Phase I success with a Phase II grant application.
Key Skills
Thinking of your project in the above stages is a useful framework for managing a project, but you will also want to hone key skills to buttress your planning. Clear communication is going to be vital for each stage. It is easy to assume we are understood by others because we already understand what meaning we intend. Take the time to talk with your team members to verify that plans, timelines, and expectations are all understood similarly. This will save a lot of conflict in the future.
Communication is also going to be necessary for meaningful feedback and review. When managing a project, it is your goal to make sure that tasks get done well. Feedback that helps people identify what they are doing well and areas they can improve on is critical in accomplishing task objectives. As a Project Manager, your role includes developing people as much as developing plans.
Finally, make sure to approach your plans with some fluidity. It can be seductive to develop elaborate plans that well exceed the amount of planning necessary for the type of tasks or the number of people involved. As a Project Manager, your goal is to create sufficient planning to help people align their tasks and work, but not so much that process overwhelms task completion. This is always worth revisiting during the Review Stage.
Blue Haven Grants Consultants’ mission is to help small businesses like yours successfully apply for and receive federal SBIR/STTR grants. Our individualized approach helps us have insight into the minutia of your project so that we are in the best position to help you write a compelling grant. That intimate understanding of your project also puts us in a great position to help you think about the project management process you and your team will engage in throughout your process. And we’ll be there to help you carry your Phase I grant success momentum into a Phase II project.
Interested in how we might be able to help you plan the project your team is currently working on? Contact us to set up a no risk and free consultation today.