We’ve developed a series of personas designed to reveal something about you as a researcher and help you explore our range of free resources tailored to your needs.

The Established Researchers Hub brings together curated resources organised by persona and topic, so you can find what is most relevant to your situation and needs. 

Are you a Project Architect?

Do you assemble people, disciplines, and timelines, knowing each success is temporary?

Do you bring together collaborators, manage complexity, and deliver ambitious research within shifting funding landscapes? Is your leadership shaped by the ebb and flow of funding cycles? 

You could be a Project Architect. 

A Project Architect’s leadership is adaptive and relational, shaped by collaborative structures, shifting external landscapes and funding cycles. They carry significant responsibility for nurturing partnerships and ensuring projects are delivered on time and on target. The Project Architect’s efforts tend to span a range of projects and collaborations, which may be distinct from one another.

Common worries

• Career fragmentation across successive projects
• Difficulty articulating project-based leadership
• High responsibility within time-limited structures
• Difficulty evidencing project-based leadership in promotion cases

What support helps

• Strategic grant portfolio planning to secure your future
• Decision-making frameworks for evaluating and choosing the right opportunities
• Tools to build coherence and a unified narrative across your projects

You can use peer discussion guides for a structured way to explore common challenges with a small group of colleagues, without the need for an expert facilitator.

Hear directly from other Project Architects

In this collection of career stories, you will find honest, grounded reflections from established researchers on the decisions they made, the trade-offs they navigated, and what they would tell their younger selves. These are not polished success narratives; they are the kind of frank, practical perspectives you told us you rarely find.

Resources curated for Project Architects 

As your projects grow in scale and complexity, you may find your challenges shifting from doing the research to enabling others to do it well across institutional boundaries. This Project Architect collection supports you as you convene interdisciplinary teams, lead multi-site consortia, or take on more expansive leadership roles within large collaborations.

On the planning side, you can access resources covering how to use a Gantt chart and Work Breakdown Structure to get everything you are carrying into one place. These tools help you make pressure points, dependencies, and a realistic scope visible, while our framework helps you plan and review in manageable waves rather than trying to hold the whole project in view at once.

Leadership support as a Project Architect 

If you are navigating the personal capacity challenges that come with leading large projects, you can use a practical metaphor-based approach to help you make realistic decisions about where to lead, where to delegate, and where to say no.

To help you manage team leadership, we provide resources addressing both structural and relational dimensions: practical guidance on big team science, a case study on building effective coordination across institutions, and a framework to help you think through the seven stages your team will move through from orientation to closure.

For when you need to adapt your leadership style as your project evolves, from consensus-building in the design phase to coaching early career researchers in delivery, you can use Goleman’s six leadership styles to understand the research-grounded conditions under which each style works best.

Not the right match?

Explore other personas to find free resources specifically tailored to your career stage.