How to run a project identification workshop with your technical team

Ask a finance team which projects contain R&D and they will name the big, visible ones. Ask the engineers and they will name the problems that kept them up at night, which are usually smaller, less visible and far more likely to qualify. The workshop exists to get the second list, with enough detail to test it against the relevant definition.

Who to invite

Technical leads for each product or engineering area, one person from finance who owns the claim, and whoever will write the narratives. Keep it under eight people. Senior management is optional and often unhelpful; people describe problems more honestly without them.

Before the session

Send a one-line brief: "We are looking for work in the last year where you did not know whether something could be done, or how, and had to find out." Ask each lead to bring three candidates. Do not send the legal definition; it makes people self-censor or, worse, tailor their answers.

The format (ninety minutes)

1. Framing (ten minutes)

Explain in plain terms what the scheme rewards: technical unknowns addressed systematically. Say explicitly that routine work, however hard, is out of scope, and that excluding it makes the claim stronger.

2. Candidate round (thirty minutes)

Each lead presents their three candidates in two minutes each. For each one, the facilitator asks the same four questions and writes the answers on a shared board:

• What were you trying to achieve?
• What did you not know how to do at the start?
• What did you try, and what failed?
• Who worked on it and roughly when?

3. Challenge round (twenty minutes)

Go back through the board. For each candidate ask: could a competent person in the field have looked this up or worked it out without experimenting? If the honest answer is yes, mark it out. Mark the rest as candidates. Expect to lose a third of the list here; that is the point.

4. Boundaries (twenty minutes)

For each surviving candidate, draw the boundary: when did the uncertainty start, when was it resolved or abandoned, and which parts of the wider project were routine? Note the names of the documents that exist for each one.

5. Owners and next steps (ten minutes)

Assign one technical owner per candidate to write the half-page project note within two weeks, and one finance owner to pull the time and cost data.

Outputs

• A candidate list with the four answers per project.
• A rejected list, with reasons, kept on file. A documented decision not to claim is evidence of a careful process.
• Named owners and a date for the project notes.

Common failure modes

• The advisor runs it alone. External facilitators are useful, but if finance is absent the claim will not reconcile, and if the technical leads do not own the notes the evidence will not exist.
• Selling in the room. If leads feel they are pitching for budget, they inflate. Make it clear that candidates can be rejected without consequence.
• Doing it once a year. Run a short version each quarter. The candidates are fresher and the project notes get written while the work is happening.

The in-house finance team program covers this workshop format and how to apply it to your own projects. Educational material, not advice.