Navigating the Challenges of Science Project Delivery

Complex science and research projects rarely succeed through the efforts of a single discipline or organization. They require project teams, end-user representatives, and specialty partners to navigate competing priorities, evolving requirements, operational constraints, and uncertainty, often while working under significant schedule or performance pressures.​

This interactive roundtable will explore how project teams can collaborate effectively when challenges cannot be solved through traditional, sequential approaches. Drawing on real-world experiences and a hypothetical project scenario, participants will discuss how teams establish shared goals, build trust, communicate across disciplines, make decisions with incomplete information, and respond when project requirements change.​

Rather than focusing solely on project outcomes, the discussion will examine the behaviors, processes, and tools that support effective collaboration. Attendees will have opportunities to share their own experiences, work through a collaborative decision-making exercise, and apply a simple “Collaboration Checkpoint” framework to a current or future project, leaving with practical strategies they can use with their own project teams.​

Learning objectives:​

1. Identify the characteristics and conditions that make collaboration particularly critical on complex laboratory and research projects.
2. Evaluate collaborative approaches for aligning owners, researchers, designers, consultants, constructors, and other stakeholders around shared project goals and priorities.
3. Apply strategies to communicate, coordinate, and make decisions when project requirements evolve, information is incomplete, or priorities compete.
4. Apply a collaborative decision-making framework to identify stakeholders, clarify information and competing priorities, establish decision-making responsibilities, and determine next steps for complex project challenges.