A short guide to Governance and management of large bids
Depending on the call, governance may be a standalone section, or embedded in your approach. In either case, appropriate governance and management structures are crucial for demonstrating your project’s feasibility, especially in complex and multi-partner bids. They also provide important mechanisms for embedding capacity development, evaluation, and risk management. Therefore your project governance should reflect and align with the application as a whole, including EDI, skills/ capacity development, and data management.
ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Below are some common roles and responsibilities within a large grant governance structure. These are different (but often related to) UKRI project roles in funding applications.
Director
- This is the Project Lead / Principal Investigator.
- They have overall oversight for the project and are ultimately accountable to UKRI for fulfilling grant requirements including reporting, compliance, budget management, etc.
- Most funders expect that this additional oversight is reflected in a higher % of time costed into project than other Co-Is.
Project/ Centre manager
- Sufficient project management resource is essential to demonstrating feasibility of your project to reviewers, and its success once funded.
- Often specifically recruited to work only on that project, project managers work closely with Director, and may line manage other professional staff (knowledge exchange, comms, admin).
Deputy Director(s)
- One or more Co-Investigator, who works closely with Director on strategic planning/ grant management, and can deputise if needed.
- A common model is to have one director + two deputies, with some diversity in discipline, career stage, and/or HEI.
- They may also have a higher % costed time than other Co-Is.
Cross-cutting Champions
- Alongside formal WP leads, it can be helpful to assign named Co-Is who are responsible for championing a cross-cutting area.
- This also provides a mechanism for that area to be a standing item on meeting agendas. On larger grants, some areas may have their own working group, with the champion acting as chair.
- Examples: capacity building, data management, EDI, ethics, evaluation, liaising with relevant UKRI investments, partner engagement, etc.
Work Package Leads
- WP leads oversee the work in their WP: monitoring progress, identifying risks, escalating problems to the Director and Deputy Director. They may have line management responsibility for PDRAs.
- Clear communication between WP leads and other management roles is therefore key – consider mechanisms to enable this.
- WP leadership is an important career development opportunity, and funders expect you to have taken this into account. It’s therefore important to consider who sits in these roles – are all your WP leads very senior male Professors, for example?
- One option is to consider having joint WP leads: a more senior colleague acting as mentor to a more junior colleague who transitions to sole WP lead by the end of project.
Advisory Group Member
- These roles are held by people not otherwise involved in the grant.
- They bring additional expertise to support with evaluation, champion the project, and provide advice on e.g. research plans, stakeholder or sector concerns, training needs, dissemination etc.
- They are usually not paid/ costed into the grant. and letter of support typically not required. It is helpful for bids to identify and name some key organisations who have confirmed they would sit on such a group.
- Some projects separate out an academic steering group from a wider advisory group including industry/ third sector/ policy makers.
- If you do this, consider (explain) the rationale for not having these groups jointly involved and working together – especially if the project/ scheme emphasises co-production or engagement.
Points to Consider
- How often will the management group meet? In person/ online? Is there an opportunity for more junior, PhDs, or Research Professional colleagues to participate in or observe these meetings?
- How often will the advisory group meet? What will their role be in evaluating progress? Who else from the project will be in those meetings? How will you ensure the wider project team have chance to benefit from this group’s time and expertise – can you invite them to annual project conference/ summer schools, for example?
- How will decisions be made in cases of disagreement? For example, if the WP2 lead and the data management champion disagree about a data management issue in WP2, who would make the final decision?
- Will the management group also cover operational updates? If not, do you need another governance level, and how will the levels interact?
- If your project involves public & patient involvement, co-production, citizen assemblies or other participatory methods, consider the scope/ role of these groups, and how they feed into wider governance.
- If your project involves pump priming or distributing funding, you will need to outline your governance plans: If there are themes, who will decide these? Who will review applications/ make funding decisions? Can there be a role for wider stakeholders or ECRs in this process?
- Governance sections can be confusing to read. Check you’re using terminology (e.g. steering/ advisory group) consistently, and consider making a glossary of your terms to refer to when editing/ proof reading.