Abstract
Increasing emphasis in the Higher Education sector for high impact research has generated a proliferation of activities aimed at supporting university research processes, commonly referred to as ‘research management’. While there has been considerable growth in this new field, it remains an elusive area, with a lacuna on what comprises good ‘research management’. A lack of common terminology and definition of the activities comprised within research management limits the capacity to provide efficient services, properly share learnings and consistently assess the effectiveness of this work.
This paper discusses the development of a research management reference model, through an Action Design Research (ADR) project conducted at a leading Australian university. The model defines 10 core domains (with areas of activities and processes within each) that constitutes the end-to-end research management process. The model was derived and validated across four ADR cycles of a detailed case study – which proved its potential value. Future research is planned to further validate the model in other universities, both within Australia and internationally.
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Notes
- 1.
Two examples are the Society of Research Administrators International (https://www.srainternational.org/) and the Australasian Research Management Society (https://researchmanagement.org.au/).
- 2.
One example was between the Research Grants and the Commercial Research team. For the former the term ‘project’ reflected the entire lifecycle from the development of a grant application, whereas for the latter a ‘project’ was only considered to exist once a contract had been signed. This simple terminology difference had caused a large deviation between the two in both processes and how systems were used.
- 3.
Domains are high level groupings, ordered in a loose logical flow, each consisting of several areas of activity, with their own list of processes.
- 4.
The final domains are presented in detail in Sect. 3.
- 5.
Management of research projects covers activities to support funding application and the subsequent oversight of funding and project obligations. It forms part of most of the domains identified with the exception of research outputs, performance and HDR management.
- 6.
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Gibson, J., Goel, K., Barnes, J., Bandara, W. (2019). Towards a Process Reference Model for Research Management: An Action Design Research Effort at an Australian University. In: Hildebrandt, T., van Dongen, B., Röglinger, M., Mendling, J. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11675. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26619-6_22
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