Speakers

Martin Kirk is the recent past president of CARA, the Canadian Association of Research Administrators and is current co-chair of the INORMS council. Martin has a BSc in chemistry from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and a PhD in applied chemistry from the University of Calgary in Canada. He has worked for 20 years in university administration. Martin is currently the director of Research Services at UBC, a top 3 university in Canada, 37 globally (THE) with 52,000 students and research revenues of $600M, annually.

Martin will present on the topic of research administration performance.
He will discuss:
1. Metrics that are appropriate for monitoring research administration efficiency and a case study of measures that have been used by the U15 (largest 15 research institutions in Canada)
2. Researcher Surveys that have been deployed at UBC and other Canadian Institutions to gauge researcher satisfaction with research admin and identify areas that need to be strengthened
3. A Unit review template that Martin created and has utilized in reviewing administrative effectiveness in numerous Canadian universities
All of these tools are important in monitoring the effectiveness of an Office of Research Services and Compliance administration. Of course once we know where we need to improve it is time to roll up your sleeves and create a quality strategic plan….. But that’s a topic for another day!

Simon Kerridge is Director of Research Services at the University of Kent, where he is responsible for all aspects of the research support including pre-award, post-award, information, strategy, assessment and governance. He has over 20 years’ experience as a research managers and is the Chair of the UK Association of Research Managers and Administrators (to July 2016) and a member of the Board of CASRAI, the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information. He is passionate about the development of Research Management and Administration as a profession and is currently PI of the RAAAP (Research Administration As A Profession) project – see https://raaapworldwide.wordpress.com/. Simon has served on a number of national inititaives, including for Research Councils UK, HEFCE, Universities UK, Jisc, and Vitae; most recently he was part of the steering group that produced The Metric Tide report. He has led a number of research management projects and spoken on these and many other RMA related subjects for various sector bodies and events including AUA, BUFDG, DARMA, EARMA, EuroCRIS, INORMS, Jisc, Million+, NCURA, RCUK, RSP, SRA-I, UKCGE, Vitae and of course many times for ARMA. He holds a professional doctorate in Electronic Research Administration.

Benchmarking Research Services in the UK
There are many benchmarks for research activities, mainly in the area of research awards (eg income), academic outputs (eg citations) and other outcome (eg patents) and these are perhaps exemplified by the Snowball metrics recipe books and explored in The Metric Tide report. Much less progress has been made in the area of metrics for research support – how do we benchmark the performance of ours research offices? There are some ad hoc surveys covering areas such as number of staff required to support a certain volume of research applications, but there are many variables which are difficult to account for, such as the degree of decentralisation of the institution, the complexity of the type of proposal, and the level and type of support provided. The talk will unfortunately not provide solutions to these issues, but will aim highlight them in order to help inform the discussions at the conference.