Facilitating innovative research projects
How Cornflower Labs helps Ivy League and R1 universities advance their research agenda
With top talent and a flexible delivery structure, Cornflower Labs enables a consortium of researchers from top universities to conduct research projects using cutting-edge technology, pushing the boundaries of research in their field.
The problem: Providing leadership and expertise to execute long-term research with cutting-edge technology
A consortium of researchers from Ivy League and leading R1 universities aimed to develop production-ready software to back a suite of data-intensive research projects. Thinking beyond one-off pilots, the team approached Cornflower Labs looking to craft stable software tools to facilitate data collection and analysis for long-term research projects in the field.
In addition to software development, the team looked for senior technical expertise to advise them on industry best practices like integration testing, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment, and infrastructure-as-code. The goal was to create production software to improve research program stability and longevity while enabling rapid and cost-effective changes to their digital ecosystem.
The approach: Targeting software development and engineering management mission needs
Technical consulting: Creating greenfield research tools using Cornflower Labs expertise
The research team brought various “If only we could…” proposals to Cornflower Labs, noting that these proposals would provide significant research value but would require senior engineering expertise and management to carry out. Senior engineers from Cornflower Labs co-designed and launched a multi-tenant full-stack product that enabled collection of research data by study participants and analysis both by the research team and by their collaborators.
By co-designing the product with the research team and end users, Cornflower was able to iteratively deliver a user-centered tool that met the needs not only of the research team, but also of their research subjects. This enabled the research team to take on new research opportunities and analyze new sources of data for their reporting.
In addition to the full-stack platform, Cornflower created a mobile application that leveraged state-of-the-art tools and APIs to facilitate novel data collection for the research team, resulting in millions of new data records. This product turned a goal of the leadership team into a reality, leveraging an agile approach to software development and involving critical team SMEs and leadership in the development lifecycle.
Engineering management: Propelling a structured and sustainable approach for technical projects
Using an Agile methodology, Cornflower Labs involved a PMI-certified project manager to lead a team with variable availability and skill levels, ensuring that work was completed for the organization-level agenda while providing a teaching opportunity by involving the group’s students in the development lifecycle.
Leadership of this research group engaged Cornflower Labs for engineering management for the following reasons:
- To delegate day-to-day operational management away from leadership
- To achieve an effective cadence to constantly improve the team’s products
- To provide a framework to better plan and organize for upcoming research priorities
- To aid in planning and executing on multi-month-long projects critical to research output
Services provided
- Iterative product development with a focus on strategic goals, long-term stability and improvement
- Engineering management
- System modernization and stabilization
- System efficiency improvements and cost reductions
Value created: Improving software quality and reliability while maximizing team effectiveness
In partnership with Cornflower Labs, the research group was able to bring a bold vision for experimental research projects to life. Through close collaboration and an Agile project management methodology, Cornflower Labs delivered research tools both on mobile and web platforms that facilitated data collection, data access for relevant parties, and database design dovetailing with the team’s research priorities.
Cornflower Labs built pivotal tools that enabled the group to make novel contributions to their research field. In addition to the direct contributions to research projects, Cornflower’s management freed up the collaboration’s primary investigators to focus on their research projects, shifting their role from a manager and contributor to a Product Owner with a team at their disposal.
“Cornflower’s flexibility, nimbleness, and expertise has resulted in stable software and documented engineering practices that we could not have gotten anywhere else.
The unstable and fast-paced environment of R1 research means that what software we need changes day-to-day and week-to-week.
Cornflower handled these fast changes in requirements with total grace, allowing us to focus on our research, rather than struggling with engineering. ”