Like others I've been following this discussion with
great interest.  One of the employees in our office divides our
functions into two parts: to serve and protect.  The service function
has an obvious set of clients--the faculty--and the effectiveness
of an office in its service capacity can be measured by focus
groups, surveys, and other means.  The client for the protect function
though, is the abstract entity "the university" and it seems to me
this activity is much harder to asssess.  You can count the number
of IRB or IACUC reviews or the number of conflicts of interest that
you manage; but what about the times you persuade a faculty member
that no, you may not inflate your base salary by 30% on the application,
or you may not put yourself downb for 10% effort with no salary,
or no, you can not list the person you would like to employ on
the budget as if they actually were employed, or no, you may not
name a faculty member of your own school as a consultant at
$700 a day?  Usually these transactions are pleasant, but sometimes
they grow confrontational.  Insofar as the sponsored programs office
negotiates these situations without passing them up to VPs and others,
it is being effective because it saves executive time; even if
the incident escalates, the office is still effectively carrying out
its function of protecting the university.

How do you measure the office's effectiveness as a protector?
Peter J. Dolce
Director, Research Support Services
Meharry Medical College
P 615 327 6703
F 625 327 6738
xxxxxx@ccvax.mmc.edu
Peter J. Dolce