Abstract:    With the speedup of new product and technology development, R&D and innovation project is taking the way of large-scale, integrated and industrialized. It is becoming more and more important to occupy market fast for the sustainable development and commercialization of projects. The traditional management method for R&D and innovation project is not adapted anymore. In this paper, features of R&D and innovation project and management status are introduced. Although the theory of project management was introduced in China early, the project management ability is not as strong as it should be. The main problems are as follows. First, most project management members are selected from scientific researchers, so that the modern and scientific management theory and experience was lacking in them. Second, project management success in an organization is highly dependent on an effective organizational communication style, especially in the face of globalization of the project management profession.  Third, no baseline is created at the start. Baseline is the approved version of a work product that can be changed only through formal change control procedures is used as a basis for comparison. In this case, the project scope cannot be clearly identified, so that the project work sometimes will exceed project scope to have a project delay and over-budge, which will have a bad impact on project success and lead to a waste of resources. In terms of the present problems mentioned above, a concept of benchmarking is raised, and a project management method is illustrated, in which rolling wave planning and digital technology is combined. 
    Because of the long execution period, decomposition may not be possible for a deliverable that will be accomplished far into the future. In order to solve this problem, rolling wave planning was developed. Rolling wave planning technique is to have a more general, high-level plan during the early strategic planning, as more is known about the upcoming events in the near term, a more detailed work breakdown structure (WBS) can be decomposed. Because it is a form of progressive elaboration, work can exist at various levels of detail depending on where it is in the project life cycle. In this paper, work is planned by year. Project management team does not need to have a detailed plan for the entire execution period. A detailed annual schedule plan should be created by the project team instead of an overall schedule plan. By means of decomposing the upper annual work breakdown structure levels into lower-level detailed components, annual project performance baseline is formed. In this way, inaccuracy of schedule plan caused by the uncertainty of technology development will be eliminated. In the process of execution, project management team should organize a stage check to make sure the annual deliverables to be completed at the end of each year. There are two circulations when rolling wave planning is applied. One is the annual plan within the execution year-execute- check circulation, the other is the stage check-annual rolling wave plan for the next year-execute circulation. During the annual execution of the project, Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDCA) circulation management system is applied to help identify issues and make changes to the planning in time. At the end of each circle of PDCA, some new inputs arising from approved changes will be added for the baseline to better tie the requirements to the overall quality planning for the project. Therefore, a new baseline is formed. Based on the work breakdown structure by rolling wave planning, a project management software "MS Project" is used to establish an annual schedule network model. Annual schedule network model can help project to monitor project schedule, cost and quality in real time and to achieve efficient, dynamic and precise management. 
    According to the practice on rolling wave planning, a very satisfied result was achieved in National Key R&D Program "Advanced Coal Indirect Liquefaction & Product Processing Integrated Technology Development". It is proved that annual schedule plan can help the project team to focus on the recent tasks, which will lead to a reasonable resource allocation and encourage the project members to have confidence to the deliverables in order to achieve the final objective efficiently. In all, using the method presented in this paper can simplify process of implementation, increase management efficiency and enhance the success rate, which can apply to the management of large-scale, market-driven and complex projects. It can provide reference for the management of R&D and innovation project in the future. However, the method and process presented in this paper should be tailored to the individual project to satisfy the specific needs. Project management team who makes the tailoring decisions should follow the principle of simple, reasonable and available, and choose the adaptive management methods and process according to the levels and stage of implementation to guarantee the management work develop efficiently. Digital technology should be fully applied in practice, which can increase the work efficiency, improve the quality and reduce the work intensity for project team. 

Key words: R&D and innovation project, rolling wave planning, schedule network model, digital technology