Project management is not that hard. There are excellent methodologies like Prince 2 that help you to keep your project on track. Yet, it is not the rational approach that will make your project into a success.

Innovation projects don't obey the classical rules

Innovative projects don't listen to schedules. Traditional project management methodologies depend on clear project goals and project boundaries. An innovative project is by definition a project of which the goals and boundaries are not clear from the start. The typical high-tech innovative project will always be on track until 95% completed and then never reach completion. Most of the time, the reason is that fundamental problems are left unnoticed because they do not pose a problem in the beginning. Yet, later on, they will turn out to be blocking issues.

Dynamic project management

The fundamental idea behind dynamic project management is that all of your assumptions are wrong. At the start of the project, you plan activities, costing and resources. You can use your experience to fill in the numbers. This is where frameworks like ITIL come in handy: they bundle a set of best practices for a problem domain (e.g. IT projects) and provide you with a reasonable set of metrics.

But what if no previous experience for your problem domain can be found? What if your assumptions are unproven? Or elements of your project are still in a research phase?
Expertise is what can save you. Expert knowledge from engineers, scientists and workers in the field is gathered by them during the project. That's why we like to work with qualitative input from team instead of quantitative. It is your team that needs to tell you how they can get the job done. It is your responsibility to organize and structure those tasks. For most project managers this is a difficult concept to grasp. They are used to tell the team what tasks need to be executed, not the other way around.
This calls for a different management approach.

Management by passion

We focus on bringing passion into the team. With a passion for the project, every team member will highlight and eliminate obstacles as soon as possible. The team will not just do what they are asked to do, they will do what it takes to solve the problem.
A passionate team will be highly self-organizing. The main role of the project manager is to ensure team members don't get frustrated. This can be done by making sure their work is appreciated and visible for the project stakeholders. Another important measure is to make sure they know where they are in the project and how tasks are organised and divided between the members. Passionate people are very bad at structuring their work, you need to do this for them. Of course, this requires a broad knowledge on the part of the project manager, since he needs to understand the jobs of all of the team members.
Management by passion comes very close to management by walking around. You need to be there with your team, full time. If you're not with the team, you need to be working on the project with stakeholders, suppliers or customers. By briefing your team on your activities and progress, they will understand where the project is heading.

Limitations

This method of project management is not suitable for large teams. The maximum size of a team that can be managed on passion is 12 people. In fact, the optimal team will only have a headcount of 7 people. This means you can only work with small projects. We believe that any innovative project needs to start this small to have any change of success. If the project is bigger, consider splitting in different sub-projects.

Passion is the only thing that makes innovative high-tech projects succeed.