In 2020, the Research Administration team in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University began offering project management services for large and complex externally funded projects. Within five years, our team has grown to include eight project managers, supported largely by the federal research awards we manage. We bring diverse perspective to our project management role with backgrounds in academia, federal agencies, and the engineering industry. We meet weekly to share practical ideas to help our teams navigate award requirements and successfully accomplish their research goals. In this talk, we will describe the structure of our project management team and share lessons learned from our efforts to bring best practices for team science into our research projects. In an ideal world research projects begin with charters that help team members reach alignment on roles, norms, project goals and the project timeline. In practice, we’ve often needed to implement charter elements “in stealth”, either because the project is already underway or because technical leads are hesitant to prioritize process and behavioral conversations. Examples will include the use of onboarding documents to formalize unwritten team norms, use of interviews and RACI charts to identify team member roles and improve workflows, and approaches for publication agreements.