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Researcher A is well into a 3.5 year funded research project. The project is gathering epidemiologicl data on 40 000 subjects (whose records are highly confidential).
Researcher A has had to recruit a number of administrators to the project. The recruitment process has been difficult and retention fraught. It has been difficult to train the administrator and even define their role that has changed as the project has progressed.
Project staff and collaborators are expected to attend a large number of meetings (of order 2 a week). Scheduling these was one of the main tasks of the administrators and this was highly problematic due to it being difficult to find a time when everyone could attend. Booking a room for the meetings was also difficult because each room had an owner who had to be contacted to find availability.
The project generated a large number of documents. These were stored on a local network drive. This documentation is used to get meeting packs together.
Microsoft Project is mandated by the project sponsor as a project management tool. This was seen as ok except the difficulties in sharing the project plan and editing it collaboratively. It is also seen as a difficult tool to learn (too many features).
A number of staff had PDAs but they were for personal use i.e. to do lists and scheduling.
Researcher A is also interested in teaching but this was not currently possible because the project administrative tasks took too much time. There was even concern that too much time was being spent on routine data management tasks and not on high level data management tasks/ analysis of data. Analysis would be done using STATA.
Researcher A tried to attend a VB course at OUCS but due to time commitments this became unfeasible (and actually solved problem by doing online research (joining an experts exchange). Endnote/ Reference manager and Pubmed were used for desk research of the emerging literature in the project's field.
Researcher A did not use IT support and had no knowledge of the OUCS IT support services. Problems were solved using a developer list ('tech exchange').
Researcher A has a colleague who was involved from the start of the project but was on leave. The colleague could provide us with more information on 'administrative burden' to do with financial and project start up tasks.