March 2014
Organisation Design
In conjunction with Colleges, draft future research management support roles and structures are being reviewed at a high level. Once concluded, these will form the basis for further review and consultation (an update will be available in April).
System Implementation
The upgrade of Agresso Business World (ABW) (to Milestone 4 Update 01) at the end of April 2014 in preparation for the new research module is progressing to schedule. A number of users from across the University have been involved in testing.
The system supplier delivered additional functionality for the new Agresso Research Costing and Pricing module at the end of March 2014. This has been installed to our research build system environment and testing by the project team is underway. These developments will allow user demos and basic testing to commence during April 2014. We are working with key stakeholders to agree the approach and audience for these sessions.
We have now agreed with Colleges the system solution for project peer review. The system will identify where projects require Peer Review based on a predefined College specific criteria. It will allow the capture the names of the individuals who have completed peer review (be it inline or outwith the specified College criteria) and include this information on the project approval summary report. Project approvers will therefore be able to review who has peer reviewed a project as part of the approval process.
Work is ongoing with key stakeholders from the Colleges regarding the criteria for an automated project approval workflow. This will determine that projects only require multiple levels of approval where the value or contribution is of a level to warrant it. By default this means that many low value/low risk projects will only require PI and HOS/HORI approval. A proof of concept is currently being built in the system in line with requirements from MVLS for PI only approval on certain classification, low value/low risk projects.