Dr Cameron Fong1
1The University of Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Cameron engages with researchers, faculty, professional staff, and students to promote, improve, develop, and implement RDM best practices. This varies from developing resources, providing support and training for the research community, working with individual researchers to develop tailored solutions, to collaborating with peers at different institutions.
Abstract:
Management has a culture of using metrics to measure value, justify initiatives, budgets, and staffing levels. Not all parts of the research operations division are able to easily produce usable metrics, and in some cases, the work and value provided are very qualitative with few readily reportable metrics compared to other teams that can draw reportable metrics directly from the systems they use.
Research Integrity and Ethics Administration (RIEA) is an area that do not have easily reportable metrics, and for some teams, the work is very hard to quantify traditionally. Compounding this, is the need to demonstrate workloads in an environment shared with other research support teams who can report positive metrics such as grants, and contracts.
The teams within RIEA have adapted a REDCap logging system to record interaction and workload metrics using simple, team standardised surveys. These surveys record interaction type, activity type, the time spent, and the details of the client. Effort has been placed in ensuring team specific surveys have been developed to best quantify the highly qualitative work that these teams do.
These interaction logs are then used to quantify and standardise support metrics for each RIEA team, collate this data and deliver a quantitative analysis of the scale and scope of work for comparative RIEA reporting. This is not a perfect quantification of qualitative work but has allowed meaningful recording of work in a manner that can compete effectively for staff funding, systems resourcing and recognition of importance to research excellence and compliance.