To: Heads of Departments, Heads of Administration & Finance and Research Support Leads, academic departments
Action required: To note the update on research contracts support.
We write to provide a service update on research contracts support from Research Services. This includes changes implemented over recent months as well as further plans to increase our capacity and continue to improve service levels.
We have seen sustained growth in demand for contract support, not only in terms of the volume of requests, but also in their complexity and urgency. There have been some tangible improvements to the service as a result of changes we have made, although there is further to go in ensuring this is a more consistent experience across all departments. We wish to thank you for your support and constructive input during a particularly testing period.
The changes we have made have focussed our capacity where it is most needed. This includes:
- Increasing the capacity of the team through
- employing contractor support to augment the contracts group in the shorter term
- recruiting contract administrators, to decrease turnaround times for straightforward agreements, ensure timely logging and closeout of cases, and to keep researchers and departments better informed of progress during negotiations
- recruiting to new posts funded via internal and external sources (see below)
- Revising our risk-based approach to contracts and modifying our approach to negotiation accordingly
- Redistributing contracts in areas under most pressure across the entire contracts group, as individual workloads allow
As well as seeking regular feedback from departments and divisions, we track a range of quantitative services indicators. These are showing improvements in our service efficiency. For example:
- The proportion of contract negotiations completed with one month has increased from 40% in 2021/22 to 46% so far in 2022/23. This 46% figure is in line with the pre-pandemic year 2018/19
- 72% of contract negotiations so far in 2022/23 have been completed within three months, which is starting to return towards the figure of 77% in 2018/19
Challenges persist, and there is more work to do in embedding these improvements consistently for all departments, however the data show we are making progress to improve turnaround times.
Departments and divisions have signalled strongly the importance of increasing the capacity and efficiency of our contracts support. Continued growth in research income, in particular from industry sources, is a central feature of departmental and divisional plans. We are grateful that in the context of a constrained three-year service funding settlement, departments and divisions have nevertheless prioritised additional investment in contracts support.
Funding secured from other internal and external sources will allow an additional nine new contract posts to be recruited. So far we have filled a number of these new posts; one Research Contracts Lead and two Research Contracts Managers have started this month. Recruitment for other posts continues, including for a cohort of new entry level positions for those wishing to pursue a career in research contracts. This ‘grow your own’ approach reflects the challenging recruitment environment for experienced research contracts professionals, which is an issue also being experienced by our peer institutions across the UK. A first round of recruitment has identified a cohort of new staff who will join us over the coming months.
Finally, we know that many departments value the regular portfolio management meetings with their contracts contact in Research Services, and this is an effective way for agreeing priorities, reviewing progress and enhancing communication. If your department does not currently have such meeting happening regularly, please let Tamsin Sayer know.
If you have any questions, comments, feedback or other issues then do please get in touch either with Tamsin or Stephen.
Many thanks for your continued support.
Stephen Conway - Executive Director, Research Services
Tamsin Sayer - Director, Research Funding & Contracts
