Standardizing impact measurement across 50+ R&D programs

Overview

ICCW runs a portfolio of 50+ water and sustainability R&D projects spanning researchers, policy teams, engineers and institutional leadership. Each group tracked progress differently — if at all — which made it nearly impossible to compare projects, report up to governance reviews, or know which initiatives were actually working.

I came in as the Product Strategy Intern to bring a shared structure to that: one way to define success, one way to measure it, and dashboards that made the answer visible to everyone who needed it.

The problem

Ambiguous, project-specific goals meant research, policy and engineering stakeholders were often optimizing for different things without realizing it. There was no common language for "impact," so governance reviews ran on anecdote rather than evidence, and interdependencies between technical, policy and user-facing workstreams went undocumented until they caused a delay.

My approach

I coordinated directly with researchers, policy teams, engineers and leadership to define success metrics and product KPIs project by project, then rolled those up into a Theory of Change (TOC) and a set of SDG-aligned impact measurement dashboards that worked across the whole portfolio rather than one initiative at a time.

Managing the interdependencies across technical, policy and user dimensions meant translating genuinely ambiguous goals into structured problem statements with measurable outcomes — the same systems-thinking habit I'd later apply at Indian Oil, just on a research portfolio instead of a distributor network.

The solution

• Converted field research and stakeholder feedback into BI requirements and dashboards used directly in governance reviews and strategic decisions.
• Standardized cross-project KPIs so 50+ initiatives could be compared on the same terms for the first time.
• Designed onboarding and feedback mechanisms to drive adoption and alignment across 25+ stakeholder groups, so the framework stuck after the internship ended.

The impact

Reporting for 50+ R&D projects moved onto a single, SDG-aligned standard, giving governance reviewers a consistent basis for decisions instead of project-by-project anecdotes. The stakeholder mapping and onboarding work meant the new KPI framework was actually adopted across 25+ groups rather than sitting unused — the difference between a strategy document and a system people actually run on.