The increased need of NAA laboratories to find beneficiaries and external funding to ensure the exploration costs requires a new view on the organization of the research and development. A higher degree of professionalism may be attained via introduction of quality management principles, e.g., via a project management of the research task. Guidance documents have been developed for this, and are being discussed. Examples are given of the use of quality- and project-management in the research activities of the NAA laboratory in Delft. Subjects discussed are internal training and qualification, planning, sources of error and documentation.