I was recently assigned as Scrum Master (or project manager, the role is still not clearly defined) to a research team of PhD scientists, working on improving the accuracy of a core algorithm in a hardware/software product. I’m struggling, and I now I have been asked by my team lead to come up with a proposal for their workflow, so I’d really appreciate input from people who’ve worked with scientific research teams.

Main tension points:

• No commitments. The team won’t commit to deadlines or timeboxes. The research team lead’s position is that “scientific workflow is incompatible with deadlines.” When I suggest timeboxing something, the answer is that it’s impossible because “we always discover new ideas to try and have to switch to them immediately.”
• Constant priority switching. Upper management regularly comes in with requests on unrelated topics. The research lead defends these as “important” and pushes to prioritize them, so the team rarely stays on one topic long enough to finish anything.
• Distraction as an excuse. The interruptions are then used to explain why there are no results on the main goal.
• Low transparency. Meetings feel somewhat performative when I join, and tickets are vague enough that it’s hard to tell what’s actually being worked on.
• It’s not really cutting-edge research. Many of the approaches they’re trying are well-known techniques that are easy to find in existing literature. To me it looks more like applied engineering with some uncertainty, which should be more plannable than they claim.

It also seems that the lead is using my "lack of helping him" as a method of scapegoating me while being pressured from upper management after not really being able to deliver anything. The other side of the coin is that all suggestions or coaching advice I gave him, he refused, and he seems to be shielding his team from me, and from the work they are doing.

My own team lead (systems engineering) has now asked me to draft a proposal, and the two of us will present it together to the research team lead trying to push him more in the direction of actually trying something.

What I’m thinking of including:

• Hypothesis-driven experiments: each piece of work states a hypothesis, how it will be measured, a timebox, and the decision it will inform
• Idea backlog: new ideas get captured and prioritized instead of chased mid-experiment
• Prior-art check: a short summary of what’s already known before starting an experiment
• Interrupt budget: a fixed share of capacity for ad-hoc requests, with anything beyond that going through explicit prioritization
• Clear priority ownership: one person who decides what the team works on next
• Trial period: run it as an experiment for a few sprints, then review together and keep or drop what doesn’t work

My questions:

1. What would you add, cut, or reframe to make this acceptable to a skeptical research lead that seems to have had his hands untied to behave as a student without any constraints up until now?
2. How do you present a proposal like this so it comes across as protecting the team rather than policing them?
3. How to form "user stories" in a research environment? I think 2 week workable chunks really do not make sense in that environment.
4. Is Scrum even the right fit here?

Examples, templates, or war stories similar situations would be very welcome.

Thanks!

Hey devs and PMs,

I’m researching the long-term trade-offs of AI coding tools for my MBA thesis—specifically looking at whether heavy reliance on AI code generation leads to skill atrophy and unexpected late-stage project delays.

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