Project management in multi-disciplinary collaborative research

Project management in multi-disciplinary collaborative research requires a wide variety of skills that go beyond those necessary for ´traditional´ project management roles. This need is derived from many sources. The difference in culture between academic and commercial projects, and the need to manage many partners - who all have competing drivers and constraints - are both factors that are at the heart of these differences with the commercial world. Within the United Kingdom, the e-Science Programme has funded many such multi-disciplinary collaborative research projects. An example of such an e-Science project is eDiaMoND, which has the principal objective of developing a prototype grid-enabled distributed database that is sympathetic to the practices employed within the UK´s NHS Breast Screening Programme. This paper explores the complexities of managing this project as a case study and identifies learning points for other collaborative projects in the research and development domain.