Questions to ask yourself before starting a new project

I recently talked to a statistician, that initiated a small company internal group of statisticians to drive forward methodological innovation projects. While this surely will help the individuals to learn more about statistical methods, it was less clear, why and on which topics the group should focus their activities on.

While most of our day-to-day activities consists of running clinical studies, submissions and directly related work, we also engage in such innovation work streams or process improvement working groups and other such activities.

Today, we’re giving you advice on how to best pick the right projects to work on as you usually have some influence on this.

Specifically we cover the following questions, you should ask yourself first:

• Does it help the business?
• Am I the right person to work on this?
• Am I excited about it?
• Do I have the right skills or what would it take to get the right expertise? Can I tap into that?
• Does it align with my goals?
• Do I have the resources or can I organise things to accommodate the resources?
• What other people need to help me?
• Is that something my supervisor will support?
• Is it worth taking the risk to move forward as a submarine project?
• What early validation steps can I take?
• Do I need budget for this?
• Is it a hell yes?