STR.16:4.1 - Establish the decision and preserve the different results

Start with the strategic subject, the decision horizon and the commitments now in question. The subject can be an organization, a provider or another arrangement whose contributions and authority can be identified. Recover current service, already accepted development work, protected conditions and resources actually available to allocate. Distinguish them from resources somebody hopes to obtain. A longer scientific horizon can remain relevant while the present decision funds only the next eight weeks of inquiry.

For each serious undertaking, explain its next useful result, receiver and grounds of worth. C.40.PC supplies this problem–contribution account; retain its distinction between a supported need and a hypothesis. Do not invent a customer for foundational research or call every internally useful result a sale. Examples of different result grounds are:

• a research claim, counterexample, explanatory model or precisely narrowed question judged by its scientific contribution;
• a product or service configuration that could supply a specified recipient contribution;
• a performer’s ability to undertake a previously unavailable class of work, under stated assistance;
• the organization’s ability to provide, accept and sustain that work through its participants and means;
• an independently usable explanation or method that other practice carriers can adopt, criticize or develop.

Use only the distinctions needed by this portfolio. A branch can contain several of these results. Keep them separate where one can succeed while another fails.

Also name the development contribution, if any, separately from the result of the ordinary work. A new scientific conclusion can be produced by an already mastered research practice; its novelty alone does not show development of the researcher or the organization. Current research, editorial and service commitments belong in the joint resource account on their own grounds even when they are not developmental changes. When developing the ability to undertake a new inquiry, maintain a wider repertoire or provide a new form of help is intended, identify that changed possibility and what must change to obtain it. Membership in a development project does not turn every constituent action into development.

For a research undertaking, use RMP.1 to identify the unresolved knowledge contribution rather than promising the desired answer. RMP.2 supplies an obtainable inquiry or a justified no-new-study result where design selection is live. A negative result or retained uncertainty can be a successful epistemic contribution under the inquiry’s answer and work-stop conditions; it is not automatically successful product development. Funding authority can select how much inquiry the organization supports without deciding which scientific conclusion is true.

Distinguish three kinds of decision beside the affected work: who can allocate the organization’s resources, who can accept a contribution for its receiving use, and who can authorize access or action. They can coincide in a small organization, but their coincidence needs an actual basis. A client retains its product and organization decisions. An independent researcher or volunteer retains choices not delegated by agreement.

Keep the task’s nesting where it is already established. A provider’s contribution to a client project can sit within its client-development programme without making the client a part of the provider. That nesting says where the provider coordinates its work; it does not settle the method, budget or authority of every participant.