Chris,

 

I think the data may be skewed a bit. Of the respondents, how many work exclusively for central offices?  Larger institutions have well founded departmental/school research admin. staff that coordinate probable submissions with PIs, developmental or corporate and foundation relations staff, school or departmental project staff, deans or associate deans, etc. On top of that they would be providing post award responsibilities in connection to various school/dept. staff and PIs as well as central office personnel.

 

The amount of FTEs can be quantified to some extent for the purposes of standardizing personnel decisions and staffing, but it would be interesting to have a survey specific to dept/school personnel, then one for central office personnel, and use the data to help quantify the potential averages and volumes combing the two data sets.

 

Thanks for this!  Greg Simpson

 

 

 

We’ve stalled out at 24 responses. Here’s the results of that data provided to date.

 

Average Hours Per Proposal			91 hours
Adjusted Average			105 hours
Average Proposal $			$166,754
Average Volume Per Staff			$4,609,274
Average Volume per Staff < 5M			$1,519,924
Average Volume per Staff 5 - 20M			$3,637,460
Average Volume per Staff  20 - 100M			$4,719,400
Average Volume per Staff > 100M			$7,593,176
Average Proposal $ < 5M			$91,296
Average Proposal $ 5 -  20M			$97,840
Average Proposal $ 20 - 100M			$160,408
Average Proposal $ > 100M			$266,901

 

There’s some interesting trends that formed so far.  Smaller institutions clearly need more staff per volume of research. Larger institutions have a higher average proposal dollar than their smaller counterparts, no surprise there. The number of hours per proposal appears to be far higher than estimated shared publicly in the originating question.  That’s not to say those responses are not correct but as previously mentioned I believe there are other activities that are consuming some of the time in this calculation. 

 

I think it would be really helpful if folks would share their thoughts on this.  What is your team working on besides managing proposals?  Are they/you involved in compliance work, post award, training, documentation, policy development, etc.  If so what percentage of a standard day would you estimate is consumed by these activities?

 

Gathering this information could be critical in building a case for adding personnel, an issue many institutions struggle with. It’s rarely enough to say you’re overwhelmed and need help.  You’ll likely need “data” to support those needs and while we’ve generated some good data here which might be of help it’s not the whole picture. Additional information might not only help staffing up, it may help with making a case for more personal development time as well as other activities that it may expose that others are doing which you may not or can’t.

 

My guess is the big guys are saying “we’re fine, we don’t need to worry about this” to which I’d say if you looked at the data I think you might be surprised.  Larger institutions numbers are wildly different from one another which implies vastly different processes are in place so some standards that could come from a deeper look at this would likely be equally valuable to institutions of all sizes.

 

If someone has already developed this please share it with the list (and I can go back to doing my day job).

 

Best regards,

Chris

 

Website: www.moderas.co

Free Trial: www.fasttrak.co

 

 

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