Research Update Consolidator

The Resarch Update Consolidator (RUC) is a system for tracking and steering applied research.

Many companies in the tech sector use sprints to deliver software. Sprints are great for moving a team forward, getting them to set short term goals, and allowing software engineers to balance across the two weeks of the sprint the exploraiton of the idea against the implementation.

However, where applied research is concerned, the Sprint approach can be too constraining. It is not normally the case that a researcher can set a definitive goal for where they expect to be in two weeks time, if their project has reached that phase, it has moved into Engineering.

The RUC framework is a framework for delivering applied research that allows the scientist control of their own direction, while allowing research managers to understand their current portfolio of research, where more focus may be required. The RUC framework divdes a project into phases. These phases go from idea conception to model production. So the process is covering the entire pipeline from idea development to model deployment. As the phases progress, the project moves more from RUC to standard sprints. The main innovation with RUC is what happens in the early stages of the project.

A key challenge with research processes is how they evolve from more exploratory work towards more directed goals. As research gets closer to production, work moves from less structured to more goal directed. In management science this is sometimes referred to as the divergence/convergence cycles of an idea. In machine learning this is called the explore/exploit trade off. We know that all objectives have this transition, but the timing of the transition is key, and the awareness of when the transition has occured so that the work can change structure. RUC takes this process into account.

There are three components to RUC.

1. There are the research priorities. These are strategically set by the team leadership, and should be broad enough that researchers can find ways to contribute, but focussed enough to drive the institutional focus forward.

2. There are project phases, each phase reflects a different stage of thinking.

3. There are phase exit criteria. These are the shorter term objectives that the scientist and or science/engineering team are workign towards.

4. There is the innovation type: is it greenfield innovation, brownfield innovation, or infrastructure?

Importantly, the scientist themselves controls the early transition between phases, defining their exit criteria and also dropping back phases when a particular approach is found to be a dead and backtracking is required. As the route to the relevant solution is identified, the process moves more towards a classical engineering approach (which, e.g. in software could be SCRUM).