When developing prototype apps, you tend toward agile practices naturally. Status/update meetings are regular and quick, if not daily. The chief difference ma

When developing prototype apps, you tend toward agile practices naturally. Status/update meetings are regular and quick, if not daily. The chief difference may be the absence of Agile's task cards, which requires too much forward decomposition of the design into bite-sized units, IMHO. R&D projects know the starting point and the objective, but only in terms of utility, not the means to that end. You're managing your team's passage through the problem space, not the solution space. That requires a lot of interaction with the client, since you need to learn from them if what you can deliver will serve their need. Thus you need to revise the task cards a lot, to the extent they just aren't that helpful in gauging your progress. It also helps that the team size in R&D is generally tiny, like one or two.