Research Program

I decided to call upon my past experience building an ISO9000-2001 Quality Management System and apply it to my R&D program. This has required some research of its own - the current standard is now ISO9000-2008. I don't have a copy of it so I am "winging it" with the intent of coercing into compliance the procedures I write now.

I feel the need for this structure. It will provide a framework for planning, managing and documenting my R&D. It will break my work down into projects with clearly defined objectives and a schedule.

The key features are:

• R&D Master List - the central reference for all R&D. It includes a unique ID for each project, a title, ownership and status.
• Research Project Control Form - the quality record specific to each research project. It includes a statement of purpose, the hypotheses to be tested, motivation, prior work and proposed method. There is a target schedule. Finally there is a statement of conclusions and caveats and further work suggested.
• Development Project Control Form - the quality record specific to each development project. It includes a statement of purpose and scope and objectives together with the specification. There is a target schedule. Finally there is a statement of conclusions and further work suggested.
• Topic List - to enable the R&D history to be searched and to prevent proliferation of search terms.

Obviously this is a work in progress. Experience using the system will inevitably result in changes.

Overkill? No. Currently I have hundreds of pages of hand-written notes and ideas for research and no way to effectively manage them. Research is at the heart of this effort. If I want to take it as far as I can, I have to start out right.