Why Project Managers Need Research Skills
The supplied teaching source treats research capability as part of the management job rather than an academic extra. This page takes that position at face value and works it through the activities you already do every week.
The claim the source makes about why research matters
The supplied teaching source does not build a case for research skills gradually. It states the purpose in a single sentence and repeats it in both the study notes and the slides, which is usually a sign that the author wanted it remembered.
Three things follow from that sentence, and they are worth separating.
- Research is framed as risk work. It sits alongside contingency, insurance and staged commitment as a way of reducing exposure — not alongside training and conference attendance.
- The unit of value is confidence, not volume. The test is whether you can answer the question with the greatest level of confidence available, which means you must be able to say how confident you are.
- Methodological understanding is required of the commissioner as well as the researcher. If you are buying the work, you still have to be able to judge it.
Effective research skills enable project managers to resolve problems and make decisions, based on the best available analysis which in turn needs to be based on the best available data. Understanding research methodology and tools is essentially about project managers making wise and well-considered decisions.
Note the chain in that second statement: decisions rest on analysis, analysis rests on data. Most delivery organisations are well supplied with data and poorly supplied with analysis, which is precisely the gap methodology fills. If you want the definitional groundwork, start with what research actually is.
The six role activities the source defines
The source anchors the argument in the project manager's own job description. It gives a table of role activities with a short definition for each. These are the activities the research capability has to serve.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT ROLE ACTIVITIES AS DEFINED IN THE SUPPLIED SOURCE
| Role activity | Source definition |
|---|---|
| Planning | Deciding what needs to happen in accordance with the deliverables. Planning tasks and schedules, staffing, resources, estimating future revenues and costs, and generating plans for actions. |
| Organising | Allocating and procuring resources, make arrangements or preparations, allocating tasks. |
| Staffing | Job analysis, recruitment, scheduling and contracting for appropriate jobs. |
| Leading/mentoring | Determining what needs to be done in a situation and motivating people to do it. |
| Controlling/monitoring | Checking progress against plans, reviewing, amending and reporting. |
| Motivation | Creating among personnel a desire or willingness to achieve outcomes within time-frames; generating enthusiasm. |
Definitions reproduced from the supplied teaching source. The wording, including its inconsistencies of grammar, is the source's.
Every one of those activities is a bet on something you cannot see
Read the six definitions again and notice how many of them contain a hidden forecast. Estimating future revenues and costs. Recruiting for appropriate jobs. Determining what needs to be done in a situation. Creating a desire to achieve outcomes. Each is an action taken on the strength of a belief about how some part of the world behaves.
That belief is usually inherited rather than tested — from the last project, from a benchmark someone circulated, from a vendor's claim, from your own experience of a different context. Research is the discipline of finding out whether the belief survives contact with evidence before the decision does.
ROLE ACTIVITY, THE CLAIM IT RESTS ON, AND THE RESEARCH CAPABILITY THAT TESTS IT
| Role activity | The claim you are betting on | Research capability that tests it |
|---|---|---|
| Planning | That your estimates of future revenues and costs hold, and that the schedule reflects how the work actually behaves. | Disciplined use of secondary data — locating existing records of comparable work, and judging whether they are relevant, timely and reliable before you rely on them. |
| Organising | That the resources you have allocated are the resources the work needs, and that they are available when the plan says they are. | Descriptive enquiry: systematic observation, recorded so it can be analysed later, of what is actually held, used and consumed — rather than what the register asserts. |
| Staffing | That your job analysis describes the job as it is performed, and that your selection criteria predict performance. | Explanatory work: testing whether the relationship you assume between an attribute and performance exists at all, while accepting that people are less predictable than non-human phenomena. |
| Leading/mentoring | That you have correctly diagnosed what needs to be done in this situation. | Exploratory research — identifying and defining the problem before proposing the solution. Most failed interventions are answers to a misdiagnosed problem. |
| Controlling/monitoring | That the measure you are reading means what you think it means, and that a movement in it is a movement in the thing. | Measurement literacy: knowing whether your indicator is attribute, ordinal or numerical data and what analysis each will bear. |
| Motivation | That what you believe motivates this team actually does. | Qualitative enquiry — words as the medium — because willingness and enthusiasm resist being counted before they have been understood. |
Turning a management dilemma into an answerable question
The source uses the phrase “management dilemmas” and asks you to answer questions about them with the greatest level of confidence. It does not, however, set out how to get from a dilemma to a question. The following sequence is a practical bridge between the purpose the source states and the seven-stage research process it describes.
From dilemma to research question
State the decision, not the topic
Write down the decision you must make and the date you must make it by. “Should we self-perform the commissioning scope on the next two packages?” is a decision. “Commissioning” is a topic, and a topic cannot be de-risked.
Name the fact that would change your mind
Identify the one thing which, if it turned out to be the opposite of what you assume, would flip the decision. That thing is your research question. If nothing would flip it, you are not making a decision — you are seeking endorsement.
Ask whether the answer already exists
Check what has already been written or measured, inside the organisation and outside it, before you commission anything new. This is the same discipline as checking the literature in a formal project, applied at commercial speed.
Choose the medium the answer has to arrive in
Decide whether the answer is a number or an account. Counting how often something happens and understanding why people do it are different studies with different designs, and conflating them wastes the budget for both.
Set the confidence the decision deserves
Match effort to consequence. A reversible decision worth a fortnight of float does not warrant a study; an irreversible commitment of capital and people does. The source's framing — risk reduction — is what makes this proportioning legitimate rather than lazy.
Doing the research yourself, or employing others to do it
The source is explicit that the requirement applies both ways. If you commission research you cannot assess, you have not transferred the risk; you have concealed it. The two roles need overlapping but distinct skills.
If you are doing the research
- You own the fit between question, methodology and methods, and must be able to explain and justify each choice.
- You must plan the time realistically. The source suggests allocating half your time to the research itself and half to writing and rewriting.
- You must consider ethics and obtain the right approvals before you start collecting anything.
- You must be able to say what your design cannot show, before a reader says it for you.
- You must store the data and the report so that the work can be checked and reused.
If you are commissioning the research
- You must be able to read a methodology section and judge whether the design can answer the question you asked.
- You must ask what population was studied and in what context, because that determines what the finding transfers to.
- You must ask whether the data is primary or secondary, and who gathered the secondary data, and for what original purpose.
- You must be able to tell an illustrative figure from an established standard — vendors rarely make the distinction for you.
- You must check that the conclusions follow from the data rather than from the supplier's prior position.
If you want to see what competent designs look like at this level, the seventeen worked research designs drawn from a published volume of master's project management research are the most useful calibration available on this site.
How much research does this decision deserve?
Risk reduction is only worth what the risk was. The rules below are a working proportioning aid; the source states the purpose but does not set thresholds, and neither should you invent one.
Proportioning research effort to decision exposure
Where project managers get this wrong
- Collecting data first and deciding afterwards what question it answers. The data then determines the question, and the question was supposed to determine the data.
- Treating an illustrative figure from someone else's case study as a benchmark for your organisation. An example is not a standard, however confidently it was presented.
- Commissioning a survey when the question asks why, or interviews when the question asks how many.
- Accepting a finding without asking what population it was drawn from, and whether your context resembles that population.
- Using research to justify a decision already taken. This inverts the purpose the source states and reliably destroys the credibility of the next study you commission.
- Confusing having a great deal of data with having evidence. Evidence is data that bears on the specific claim you are making.
How to tell your research capability is actually working
Capability shows up in the quality of the questions you ask, not the size of the report you receive. The checks below are ours, drawn from the source's framing of confidence and fit.
Six signs the capability is real
- You can state, in one sentence, the decision a piece of research is meant to de-risk.
- You can name in advance the finding that would change your mind.
- You can say whether your evidence is primary or secondary, and why that distinction matters for this decision.
- You can explain why the method fits the question, rather than that the method is common in your industry.
- You can describe the limits of the answer to a sponsor without being asked to.
- You can tell the difference between a source's illustrative example and a source's requirement.
Where you go next depends on your role. If you are about to run the work yourself, look at the core skills the source expects of a researcher. If you are still choosing a subject, the source's list of research themes in project management is the fastest way to find territory that is both relevant and already written about.
What to carry forward
- The source's claim is the anchor: the primary purpose of research is to reduce the level of risk of a business decision.
- Six role activities are defined in the source; every one of them rests on a belief that could be tested and usually is not.
- The obligation to understand methodology applies whether you conduct the research or employ someone else to do it.
- Proportion the effort to what the decision costs to reverse — and if no answer would change your action, do not run the study.
- The activity-to-capability mapping here is a synthesis; the six activities and the purpose claim are the source's.
Frequently asked questions
Does the source say research is only for formal, academic projects?
No. It frames research as a means of reducing the risk of a business decision and of resolving management dilemmas, and it applies the requirement to project managers who employ others to do the research as well as those who do it themselves. The academic project is one setting for the skill, not the reason for it.
How many role activities does the source actually define?
The table defines six: planning, organising, staffing, leading/mentoring, controlling/monitoring and motivation. The introductory sentence names eight by also listing procuring and reporting, which the table folds into organising and controlling/monitoring respectively.
I am buying research from a consultancy. What is the minimum I need to understand?
Enough methodology to judge whether the design can answer your question. In practice that means being able to ask what population was studied, in what context, whether the data is primary or secondary, and whether the conclusions follow from the data. The source states that understanding methodology is required whether you do the research yourself or employ others.
How do I decide how much research a decision warrants?
Proportion the effort to what the decision costs to reverse. The supplied source states the purpose of research as risk reduction but sets no thresholds, so any rule you apply is a judgement, not a standard. The practical test is whether a plausible answer would change what you do.
What is the single most common mistake?
Running the research after the decision has effectively been made. It inverts the purpose the source states, and it teaches the organisation that research is theatre — which makes the next genuinely useful study harder to fund.
References and source attribution
- The supplied teaching source: master's-level teaching notes and slides introducing research methods for project management practitioners. All role activity definitions and the risk-reduction claim on this page are drawn from that material.
- Veal, A. J. 2005, Business Research Methods: A Managerial Approach, Longman. (Cited in the supplied source.)
- Bryman, A. 2016, Social Research Methods, 5th ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford. (Listed in the supplied source's reading list.)
- O'Leary, Z. 2017, The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research Project, 3rd ed., Sage Publications, London. (Listed in the supplied source's reading list.)
Suggested questions for Ask KEVOS
- Map my current project decision to the research capability that would reduce its risk.
- What questions should I ask a consultancy about the methodology in their proposal?
- Help me turn this management dilemma into a single research question.
- How do I judge whether a benchmark figure applies to my organisation?
- What is the difference between having data and having evidence for a delivery decision?