R2O | Research to Operations

The actors involved in R2O usually have other responsibilities or roles in the research labs or on the operations floors. It should come as no surprise that these other activities can occasionally detract from contributing to a transition project. In order to successfully manage these actors, it is important to set reasonable timelines for the project and its elements, and, in doing so, understand how the individuals along the critical path spend their time. The purpose of this exercise is not to micromanage individuals or place blame for the incompletion of a task. Nor is the focus on what is not getting done. Instead, the challenge is to determine how each employee participating in an R2O effort is incentivized. Incentives may be material (such as pay correlated with performance) or based on personal motives and values. An additional layer of complexity comes into play when R2O transitions intersect organizational boundaries, particularly when there is not an owner-contractor relatio...

As children, we built things out of LEGO bricks to show our creativity and express our imagination. LEGO bricks are different sizes and colors, but they are all able to connect to another. Considered alone, they are relatively simple, but together, they contribute to something larger and much more impressive—a manifestation of an idea that is now tangible. And they can be rearranged into a new creation with a different appearance or purpose. The individual LEGO bricks do not change, but the concept does. Take the average organizational flowchart and consider how it might look assembled from LEGO bricks. Suppose each LEGO brick represents a distinct team or function within the organization. The amount of direct contact that team or function has with other parts of the organization necessitates the relative size of the brick (so that other bricks can connect to it). Hopefully, the smaller bricks are near the foundation, and the larger bricks are near the top. In this analogy, if more tha...

It is an all too common occurrence these days. Code that someone wrote years ago stops working and results in a cascading set of downstream failures, or, possibly worse, old data ends up downstream and no one immediately notices. I remember this happening to a colleague who maintains a numerical weather prediction model for research purposes. As spring wore on, it seemed that the overnight low temperatures were consistently too cool over the northern United States. Then it became June and model-forecasted lows were still tumbling into the 30s every night. It was only then that he dug into the code and realized the problem: the snow cover analysis was from the middle of winter. Oops. He tracked down the offending lines of code that did not properly check the date of the analysis and then remarked how the old Fortran code provided great “job security” because it had become so complex and unwieldy to maintain that it would take someone else eons to detect and fix issues. That may be so, b...

There have been many attempts to develop a single framework for streamlining R2O transition activities that is capable of handling the wide range of projects. While some have short-lived success, eventually these frameworks encounter difficulty meeting the diverse time, funding, maturity, scale, and scope characteristics of R2O projects. One idea to better represent the status of R2O projects has been to replicate the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) uses to monitor the maturity of certain technologies. While TRLs and analogous concepts have their place in the engineering community because of their relationship to physical, mission-relative deliverables, such readiness levels and other representations of progress are challenging to develop for a fluid R2O environment. There are a few major reasons for this challenge. First, when R2O activities commence, there is no guarantee that they will produce a transitioned product i...

With R2O posited as central to the evolution of an organization’s operations, the exact purpose of proving grounds and testbeds within a transition cycle is easily blurred beyond the immediate objective of demonstrating research in the operational setting. But make no mistake; senior leadership and managers are responsible for establishing strategic and tactical priorities and guiding all activities within the organization. It is not the place of R2O processes or actors within R2O to challenge the proposed direction, or potentially more detrimental, shallowly confirm them. Instead, activities that occur as part of a transition cycle should inspire new avenues for an organization to explore in achieving its mission. This may seem like a fine line, but the core difference here is evidence. There are several forums within the R2O process that provide evidence about how practitioners are responding to new scientific research and technology. This evidence should be carefully collected and a...