The Heilmeier Catechism
Gio Wiederhold (see also here) introduced me to the “Heilmeier Catechism”. As director of ARPA George Heilmeier had a set of questions he expected every proposal for a new research program to answer. He referred to them as the Heilmeier Catechism. It’s useful to answer these questions for any individual research project - for yourself and for communicating to others what you hope to accomplish. These questions are:
- What is the problem, why is it hard?
- How is it solved today?
- What is the new technical idea; why can we succeed now?
- What is the impact if successful?
- How will the program be organized?
- How will intermediate results be generated?
- How will you measure progress?
- What will it cost?