Your chance to influence investment

As you are no doubt aware, we launched a ‘Thought Exchange’ survey to gather the opinions and suggestions of our research community. Everyone’s feedback is very welcome.

This is one of the most valuable opportunities you will get throughout the 5-year programme to allow you to influence investment in the programme. You only have until Tuesday 3 April to complete the survey, and we’d like you to encourage your colleagues to complete the survey too:

• Research IT – Your Chance to Influence Investment

Requirement gathering

The programme’s ‘requirement gathering’ is now complete. Outline system designs are under way, and various options for investment are being considered. After the options have been assessed, a business case will be written for the Change and IT Management Process (CITP) sub-committee, to approve a five-year funding plan.

Our engagement with members of our research community will continue through various channels, including our next drop-in session on Wednesday 28 March. See the Events section below for more information.

How did our workshops work?

In Newsletter 2, we mentioned we were planning to hold stakeholder engagement sessions and conduct workshops.

For those of you wondering what happened after the engagement, and what we do with the feedback we receive – we have a structured approach using targeted questions with participants, either individually or in smaller groups.

This provides beneficial information which we can interpret as a requirement; the difference between where we are now and where we’d like to be in the future. This could be the solving of a problem, a new function, or savings in time and money.

The information on page 2 of the ‘supplemental content‘ document shows how interview questions created a list of requirements. The requirements are then cross checked with other specialists through ‘Deep Dive’ workshops. These workshops concentrate on one aspect of the various issues around IT support for research.

The list of requirements are then categorised and graded according the value the requirement was assigned by people who expressed a need for that requirement. The interviews and workshops have created over 300 IT and research data requirements.

These 300 requirements have been categorised into 14 broad sets of requirements. To respond to the demand for these requirements, the support organisations within the University need capabilities. Some of these capabilities are fully met, partially met or not met from within our current capabilities. 

The information on page 3 of the ‘supplemental content‘ document shows a set of top requirements in 2 of the requirements categories. As you will see, there are very disparate requirements with various emphases on what the required capability can provide in a service. 

The next step is to integrate these requirements into a framework for service delivery that fits with the University’s structures and organisations. 

We’ll share our progress for you in the next edition of the newsletter, scheduled for release on Wednesday 4 April. 

Events

An invitation to our open house event – Wednesday 28 March

Over the past few months, we’ve worked with many people across campus to gather their feedback, comments and thoughts on research at The University of Manchester, and we’d like to share our progress with you. 

Our ‘open house’ event on 28 March is open to anyone at the University with an interest in research, and as well as updating you on where the programme is, we’re still keen to gather your opinions which will help us shape the programme.

We will have a desk for each workstream, to provide updates in an interactive way and focus on your questions and inputs, rather than a one way session.

Register below, until 10am on Wednesday 28 March:

• Wednesday 28 March: Research Lifecycle Programme – progress so far 
  

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