Breakout Session 1 - What Post Award challenges are you facing in your institution right now? by ARMA UK

2025-04-29 08:41:08 UTC

Understanding roles and responsibilities

2025-04-29 08:43:02 UTC

Challenge = recent restructure and have lost 50% of our staff and we trying to find ways to work smarter, streamline processes and find greater efficiencies.

2025-04-29 08:43:30 UTC

Where does responsibility lie, research office or finance, when submitting and monitoring claims?

2025-04-29 08:43:48 UTC

compulory redundancies in professoriat for research - will effect what projects we run potentially

2025-04-29 08:43:49 UTC

Lack of ownership of key tasks between research office and central finance office

2025-04-29 08:44:29 UTC

more clear roles and structures

2025-04-29 08:47:22 UTC

Financial pressures leading to merging of pre and post award and the challenges surrounding that

2025-04-29 08:47:37 UTC

Reduction in resources, particularly staff.

An out-dated/fractured set up i.e. office set-up and delegation of responsibilities across departments leads to confusion/duplication.

2025-04-29 08:51:51 UTC

Mixed messages from finance colleagues and different reporting methods re budgets etc means that research office staff are having to unpick information and explain to academics so duplication of effort

2025-04-29 08:51:52 UTC

relatively new IRO, small research development team of 3 covering range of research management functions

2025-04-29 08:52:17 UTC

Possible merger of faculties. Potential to reduce headcount.

2025-04-29 08:52:35 UTC

researchers who are new to research funding so haven't managed a grant before

2025-04-29 08:55:29 UTC

Role and responsibilities of what is post award (where finance, contracts etc sit)

2025-04-29 08:58:32 UTC

Very small RKE compared to most universities, small centralised team to cover Development, Pre-award, Post-award & project delivery support. Work load is very high and there is conflict between what different teams want us to provide and a lack of appropriate systems to use such as a RIMS or Finance Package.

ushmagudka — 2025-04-29 08:58:33 UTC

Mixed experiences with lots of change occurring over the years. Differing resources

2025-04-29 08:59:29 UTC

Finding the right guidance and knowledge in relation to implementing flexible fund processes as this appears to be relatively new within the school at my institution.

2025-04-29 09:00:01 UTC

Trying to address PIs towards the right people within Legal, Finance, HR teams.

2025-04-29 09:00:12 UTC

Lots of change in recent years following multiple restructures, high workload, lack of experience in post-award team, confusion around ownership of specific tasks/processes.

2025-04-29 09:00:23 UTC

post-award: PI portfolio reviews help in housekeeping but for complex projects, learning for alternative structures would be benefitial

2025-04-29 09:01:10 UTC

Different systems to support post award processes.

2025-04-29 09:02:59 UTC

Cyle of centralisation, decentralisation and hybrid

2025-04-29 09:04:09 UTC

Other challenges:

1) systems not flexible and don't communicate.

2) HR/recruitment delays.

3) Legal/contracting delays.

2025-04-29 10:32:47 UTC

Big challenge to address: trying to remove from Finance the lifecycle management of the grant and direct it to Research Grant office, so that they will mainly deal with invoices etc rather than management, so a RACI system would be useful to do that