Developing Tools to Inform the Management of Research and Translating Existing Good Practice

Project Based at Imperial College London

 

View the project's Final Report on issuu.

 

People, processes and systems are key factors in delivering research excellence, both operationally and strategically. The functions of university research offices and the demands on staff working in research management have become more varied, growing to embrace a wide range of activities and responsibilities. Yet, as was demonstrated in the Professionalising Research Management report (2009), this is a young profession, characterised by a lack of coordination, few shared structures, and with no regulated qualification framework.

There is a growing recognition in Higher Education of the need for research intelligence and well-established performance management frameworks. These can help focus institutional strategies on research quality, raise the profile of an institution's research nationally and internationally, manage talent, and build a high-quality research environment. Yet there also appears to be considerable dissatisfaction with the systems on offer, and a lack of coordination between institutions as each implements their own solution to problems that are shared across the sector.

Imperial College set out to understand the current research management systems landscape. It has focused on how information from data can be used to inform strategic decision-making at a variety of levels, and on how research management can be improved across the sector.

This study is not system-specific and seeks to develop an understanding of system needs, especially in relation to information intelligence independent of specific products. Ultimately, however, effective implementation of a software system is as critical as the product itself.

There is a need to review the university sector's success in implementing research management systems with the aim of translating good practice and providing a resource for the sector.

This study evaluates the ways in which institutions across the sector create and implement tools for managing research-related data from systems, and compares the variety of tools available. By doing this it has aimed towards a fuller understanding of how system tools can be best implemented.