The commonality of challenges
This post is based on experience with Research Consulting’s Research Contracts Benchmarking Exercise - if you haven’t already you should read the report here.
“We’re different,” they said.
Which, yes, of course - each of us is genuinely a snowflake (a term that has somehow become derogatory even though snowflakes are amazing).
But I think what is surprising - at least to me - is just how common challenges are across teams that deliver contracts.
The majority of my career has been at large Russell Group universities with high levels of research income. More recently I’ve worked in a law firm with a number of different clients - university and non-university - and been fortunate enough to work with many universities and research organisations outside of the Russell Group. I’ve spent a week embedded in a team at a world-leading Irish University to review their service delivery. I’ve worked alongside NHS Trusts and commercial organisations (both SMEs and multinationals) engaged in research. I’ve also dealt with other types of agreement.
The Research Consulting Research Contracts Benchmarking Exercise included organisations with research income from £2m to over £530m. This included research contracts teams with dozens of staff, as well as universities with 1 or 2 FTE dedicated to research contracts.
The truth is that there are many more commonalities than there are differences, and that there is something to learn from the way every team handles contracts.
Recruitment and retention is difficult, knowledge management, deployment of tech, understanding of the function and its purpose, workload pressures - these are not unique to one format of research contracts team.
We too often look for others that look exactly like us to compare ourselves against - but in fact I’ve found the most useful insights come from unexpected directions. If you are involved in drafting, reviewing, and negotiating contracts - and you feel there must be some way to do this better - then I would strongly encourage you to look for others that look different to you.
If you have a large team and struggle with staff turnover - maybe look at how those with smaller teams (which are subject to proportionately increased effect from a single member of staff moving on, for example) handle this. If you have a smaller team, what efficiencies do larger teams have and how many of these could you adopt?
Even beyond contracts teams - there are insights hidden in legal operations, project management, software development, marketing, accountancy, creative writing…the list goes on.
The Research Contracts Benchmarking Report was fortunate to include a range of participants and both the report and the in-person event benefitted from this. I hope we see more conversations across research organisations of different types as it may just be that this type of diversity prompts innovation.