Traditional management of larger scale research projects often involves setting up steering committees who check on progress through status updates and discuss solutions to issues that arise. However, there are many modern tools and methods used within industry that research environments and projects could benefit from, such as data engineering, software development, and operations management. Thus, our general strategy incorporates not only the standard project management activities as well as modern approaches to coordinating tasks and outputs between groups. The general strategies we’ll take are to:
- Establish an overall management group and a research operations group of relevant persons from each center to track progress, coordinate tasks, and manage the project.
- Develop and agree on some guiding principles for collaboration and work to follow across centers and WPs that adhere to open science practices.
- Investigate and identify resources, limitations, and barriers on cross-Steno collaboration practices and processes.
- Develop and agree on a set of common tools and standards to use across centers for WP to have smoother collaboration and sharing of outputs, that also consider the barriers and resources as well as the guiding principles.
Guiding principles
One of the initial steps in the strategy involves developing and implementing general principles that will guide collaboration and work across the Steno Centers. This ensures we have a basis for following a common approach to working and communicating together when managing the WPs. While we will finalise and refine the principles during the first year of the project, below are some principles that will form the basis for all other principles.
- Assume openness with as many things as possible, including communication
- Implement openness as much as possible, excluding personal and sensitive data
- Disseminate as many steps of the research lifecycle as possible, including non-traditional outputs (e.g. protocols or standard operating procedures)
- Implement as much as possible explicit analyses and data processing/management using code-based and programmatic pipeline/workflow management
Actions
Potential tools and methods to use
The exact tools and methods that will be used will first need to be decided upon by everyone. However, some of the tools and methods that we are considering that follow the principles include:
- R for programming, data processing, and analysis
- GitHub to use as the knowledge repository
- Quarto (next generation of R Markdown) for writing and sharing documents, as well as creating websites
- Slack/Teams/Discord for central communication
- GitHub Projects for project management
- Agile (e.g. Scrum and Kanban) inspired iterative and incremental methods for project management
- Seedcase software for data management and sharing
Potential barriers and challenges
Aside from the standard project management tasks, implementing modern research ops and collaborative practices that support conducting open and reproducible science across all Steno Centers will be a challenge. Given that personnel in research environments with the necessary technical knowledge and skills are few and often move out of academia into industry positions, a substantial amount of time and effort will be spent in training and upskilling existing personnel. The reason we’ve structured the groups to include at least one “tech lead” who is also part of the research ops group is to help minimise this challenge. We aim to provide training to this tech lead by embedding them in some of the work we are doing at Steno Aarhus, where we have been implementing many of these practices.
Another major challenge will be coordinating tasks and work between IT systems that often don’t work well together or are suboptimally designed for cross-institution collaboration. This is one reason we’ve decided to establish a research ops group, so that we can minimise the impact these issues have on completing the project deliverables.
People and groups
Management group
The project will be led by the PI, with support from the co-applicants / Work Package leaders, who together form the management group. Aside from individual groups for each WP, there will also be a group dedicated to overseeing the research operations. This group will, at a minimum, be composed of at least one person from each WP (and preferably in each center) who acts as a “tech lead” for that WP group. The tech lead should be someone with above average literacy in programming/computing/IT.
Research operations
The aim of research operations is to optimise day-to-day work in order to minimise time and effort spent per unit of output. The research ops group will act as a unit that works to reduce tech barriers, develop software and data engineering processes and tools, and advise on how to best design the outputs of WPs that are the inputs of other WPs. Some of the initial tasks revolve around establishing: a communications channel for everyone (as well as sub-channels for individual WPs and groups) that make it easy to keep everyone updated and to view all communications done (not emails); a project management platform visible and usable by everyone; an effective project management approach that groups can use to track tasks and deliverables (e.g. a suitable approach might be using Kanban principles); and a document sharing platform, ensuring that all of these also follow the guiding principles. Later tasks include developing the deliverables of the WPs in a way that makes sharing and interoperability easier, both internal to the project groups and WPs as well as to external stakeholders.