Grant management & execution

Understanding the grant agreement: roles, responsibilities, & expectations

Strategies for effective grant management: tracking, reporting, and
communication
Dealing with changes and challenges during grant execution; course corrections

Eesha Sharma, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor, Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
NIMHANS, Bengaluru
At the outset, ….. disposes of the idea that adequate expenditure of money or of men
on research is all that is required.
It is a matter of …
team-work
and co-operation
and of ensuring the conditions most favorable to the generation of ideas.

Russell, Nature, 1947

Elements of research management
Funding
Academic freedom
Scientific integrity
Accountability
Collaboration

Institutional research strategy Publication and research ethics

Teaching Risk management
Staff policy Publicity & promotion
Protection and commercialisation

Lasambouw, Conference: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conferenceon Research of Educational Administration and Management (ICREAM 2019)
Splitting the work

Sprint planning

Sprint execution

Weekly scrum

Sprint review,
retrospective
& planning

Pirro, Nature, 2019

The grant agreement
• The research question
• Stated goals and objectives
• Dates
• Budget allocation and heads
• Staff recruitment rules
• Reporting formats
• Reporting timelines
• Terms and conditions for secondary / sub-collaborations
• Data storage & access
• Consent forms storage
• Intellectual property terms and conditions
• Authorship rules
• Involvement of lived experts
Roles & responsibilities
Who Will Do What?
• expected contributions of each participant
• Who will write progress reports and final reports?
• personnel decisions
• personnel supervision
• data management, including access & long-term storage

Contingencies & Communications:

• mechanism for routine communications among members of the research team
• redirecting research agenda as discoveries are made
• negotiating the development of new collaborations and spin-off projects

Should one of the principals of the research team move to another institution or leave the project, how will
you handle data, specimens, lab books, and authorship and credit?
Project coordinator
• Overall responsibility & oversight
• Understand & ensure compliance with terms / conditions
• Ensure successful achievement of goals / objectives
• Oversight on submission of quality programmatic and financial
reports within stipulated deadlines
• Facilitate effective communication among stakeholders
• Ensure all expenditures are allowable
• Maintain all project records for audit purposes
• Monitoring and managing contracted services
Scientific record keeping
If it wasn’t written, it didn’t happen!
Proposal Execution Data Communication
Grant application SOPs: Primary Informed consent
Rules or procedures for forms
Questionnaires collecting, labeling, Secondary
annotating, storing, editing, Audit reports
cleaning, auditing, Meta
processing, excluding, and
analyzing data
Correspondence with
Preliminary analysis journals
Records of materials used in
research Manuscript drafts Correspondence with
research oversight
Rules or procedures for committees and
calibrating scientific funding organizations
instruments

Computer software used

Why keep records?
1. Data analysis, publication, collaboration, peer review, etc.
2. For reproducing results
3. Defense against false allegations of research misconduct
4. Mandated by law for certain types of research
(e.g. research involving hazardous biological materials)

5. To support intellectual property claims

(e.g. patents)
Records should describe
• Who conducted it (including the person making the record)
• What you did
• When you did it (clearly stating month, date, year, and time of day)
• Why you did it
• What project the research was part of
• How you did it (including the methodology)
• What materials were used
• The findings
• The interpretation
• The next step(s)
Record keeping formats
• Bound notebook
• numbered pages.
• signed and dated on the inside front
cover to indicate the first day
• table of contents listing experiments and
a list of abbreviations
• information should be kept in a linear
fashion without skipped pages
• writing should be in black or blue ink,
never pencil
• errors should be lined through with a
single line, never erased or obliterated
• corrections made to previous entries
should be initialed and dated
Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN)
Electronic Resource (/Research/Records) Management System (/Software) [ERMS]
Scientific Data (/Document) Management System (/Software) [SDMS]

• End to end solutions – capture, record, centralize, protect data

• Collaborative with fine-grained access controls
• Simplify data copying and backups
• Searchable, accurate, legally stringent
• Greater efficiency, reduced costs
Factors affecting research quality
• Rater drift
• Equipment issues
• Staff turnover
• Factors at data collection centres
• Test-retest unreliability
Quality control (management) elements
• Clear statement of research objectives
• Study population clearly specified and defined
• Selection of assessment tools
• Optimization of study procedures & assessments
• Standardization of equipment
• Pilot testing of instruments & protocols
• Communication mechanisms
• Data handling
Course corrections
• Assessment tools
• Assessment procedures
• Recruitment sources
• Selection criteria for participants
• Quality control –
• Data checks: Completed assessments, demographics, duplications, strange/
missing value
• Row checks for ‘social desirability’ or ‘biased’ responses

Any changes in protocol – to be cleared by IEC

Grant management & execution is about…
• Teamwork with clearly defined roles and responsibilities
• Maintaining standard procedures and protocols
• Documentation
• Adaptation

Enabled by cooperation and openness

 Advisory
board

Principal Steering
investigator committee

Project Data
Workgroups
coordinator management

Research
associates

Data Technical
collectors personnel