Building a SR&ED process has to include a moment of discovery – that process is almost the perfect opposite of individual effort. I knew that – I had spent years documenting and working with other people’s processes. What I had forgotten, and had to relearn, was the extent to which personal involvement can cloud your objectivity. Here’s what I have learned, again.
There was a time when I thought I was involved in building a SR&ED process. If people asked me, I would point to a sequence of steps, many of them taken by me, and describe that effort as “a process”. Wrong.
What I was doing, in that situation, was to substitute my own effort for process – identifying, monitoring, interviewing, scoping, drafting… all the way to defending SR&ED claims. I was consumed with trying to “pull” all the information I needed from the people who knew it – technical and financial primes. It meant that the wrong people – me, myself, and I – were doing things that should have been done, even driven, by those key technical and financial people. That wasn’t a process – that was just me doing a lot of stuff, and trying to get the energy moving.
To be continued...
Bruce Madole