roles: Project manager

Introduction

As a project manager in a research software project, you are responsible for coordinating the successful delivery of software-related projects and managing various resources - including people, tasks and timelines. Your role focuses on planning, organisation, communication, risk management and ensuring that software development activities progress effectively and timely. In larger projects where a project manager can be supported many of the tasks of the principal investigator are out sourced to by the principal investigator to the project manager with the principal investigator taking more of a senior stakeholder, project sponser role.

Unlike a Product Owner, whose primary focus is maximising the usefulness and impact of the software and effective communication with researchers and external collaborators, your role focuses on delivery coordination and operational management. You help ensure that research software projects remain achievable, well-organised, properly resourced and aligned with project objectives and constraints.

Research software projects often involve distributed teams, evolving research requirements, fixed-term funding and interdisciplinary collaboration. Managing uncertainty, dependencies, competing priorities and sustainability concerns is therefore a key part of this role.

Close collaboration with product owners, principal investigators, Research Software Engineers (RSEs), researchers, infrastructure providers, and institutional stakeholders is essential.

Software development & quality responsibilities, challenges & tasks

Your responsibilities focus on coordinating and enabling effective software development and quality processes, including:

• Planning and coordinating software delivery — organising timelines, milestones, deliverables, and tasks across software-related activities.
• Managing project scope and priorities — helping teams balance research goals, technical complexity, available resources and delivery expectations.
• Managing resource allocation — coordinating people, expertise, infrastructure, and budgets required for software development activities.
• Supporting software development workflows — coordinating development processes such as sprint planning, issue tracking, releases and reporting.
• Encouraging adoption of collaborative development practices — supporting the use of version control, issue tracking, continuous integration, and transparent workflows across teams.
• Tracking progress and delivery risks — monitoring schedules, blockers, dependencies, staffing constraints and technical risks.
• Supporting quality assurance processes — ensuring time and resources are allocated for testing software, software documentation, code review, validation, and reproducibility activities (e.g. software citation and licensing).
• Coordinating software releases and deployment activities — schedule releases, integration activities and delivery processes.
• Maintaining project documentation and reporting — making sure user and developer documentation is up-to-date; tracking decisions, lessons learned and project status.
• Managing stakeholder expectations — communicating progress, limitations, delays, risks and trade-offs clearly to stakeholders.

Software development & quality guidance

• Project management methodologies — coordinating software projects using approaches such as Agile software development, Scrum, Kanban, hybrid, and traditional project management methods.
• Research software development workflows — understanding practices such as version control, release cycles, issue tracking, and collaborative software development.
• Risk and dependency management — identifying and mitigating technical, organisational, staffing, infrastructure, and delivery risks.
• Software quality assurance processes — ensuring testing, code review, validation, reproducibility, and documentation activities are incorporated into project plans.
• Reproducibility and research integrity practices — supporting processes that improve reliability, transparency, and reproducibility of research software outputs. See guidance from The Turing Way and the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN).
• Open-source project coordination practices — managing distributed contributors, governance, community engagement, and collaborative development workflows. See the Open Source Guides and guidance from the Research Software Alliance (ReSA).
• Research software sustainability planning — considering maintenance, onboarding, training, infrastructure, funding, and long-term ownership. See resources from the Software Sustainability Institute - e.g. on Software Management Plans.
• Communication and stakeholder management practices — facilitating coordination across technical and non-technical communities through transparent communication and reporting.
• Continuous integration and delivery practices — supporting reliable and repeatable development and release processes through continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment.
• Research Software Maturity Models (RSMM) — understanding broader sustainability and quality considerations for research software projects. See the Research Software Maturity Model (RSMM).