Conquer the budget, conquer the project

It pleases me no end to begin with this tweet:

“Budget is a proxy for project planning” says Aidan Byrne: inaccurate budgets indicate project not well thought through
— Dr Inger Mewburn (@thesiswhisperer)

Aidan Byrne is the Australian Research Council’s CEO, and @thesiswhisperer livetweeted his presentation from the ANU Acton campus. The talk brimmed with tasty morsels for the Research Whisperers to chew on and, having half-written this entry already, it seemed an opportune time to get it out there!

What spurred me to write this post?

Not the bottom line (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

The fact that just about everyone leaves the grant budget till last.

No matter how many times I bring it up with researchers and their teams, and encourage early tackling of the budget, the poor thing ends up being rushed through, thrown together, or created from the ether.

This isn’t good for it. It can get resentful and make your entire application ineligible if you don’t pay enough attention.

This year’s ARC DECRA (ECR award), for example, has a ceiling of $131,740 per year in funding – over $90K of which goes towards the awardee’s salary. This leaves up to $40K as project costs. That’s it. You can’t argue for more; that’s just what the scheme is. If your project doesn’t fit into this budget, then this scheme may not be for you, or you would need to scaffold the project funding with commitment from other sources.

Many view the budget as a poor cousin to the regal elements of ‘track-record’ and ‘project description’, but they do it a disservice. The humble budget, properly conceived and executed, can be the foundation and catalyst for project efficiency and team bonding.

Finding that hard to believe?

Read on, because here are five ways that conquering your budget can help you conquer the project (or your grant application, at least):

For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow

Balloon and bear, by Jonathan O’Donnell on Flickr

Recently, I received an application that was asking for a postdoctoral research assistant.

I thought, “That’s odd. Normally, we would talk about a ‘postdoc fellow’.”

Then I thought about all the requests that I’d fielded lately for funding research assistants.

My first question when working out the budget is: “Do you want someone who has a PhD already?”

If they have a PhD already, then doesn’t that, by definition, make them postdoctoral?

What exactly is the difference between:

• Research assistance;
• Research associate;
• Research fellow;
• Research assistant?

It is important to know, as they have very different budget implications.

Don’t just throw your keys in the bowl

Still from The Ice Storm
(Source: http://img2-2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/080321/must-list/the-ice-storm_l.jpg)

The 1997 movie The Ice Storm (which I remember being rather depressing) depicts a 1970s ‘key party’. A key party, in case you missed this piece of 70s pop culture, was a way for suburban couples to engage in sexual experimentation, particularly swinging.

Stay with me here, because I think the swingers’ key party has a lot to tell us about why some research collaborations can go so terribly wrong.

The idea behind a key party is simple. Couples are invited to attend a party with a bunch of other couples. One of the partners leaves their car keys in a bowl. Later (presumably after large amounts of booze and whatever else), the other partner selects a random set of keys from the bowl and goes home with the person who owns them to…engage in certain activities.

Anyway, we’re all adults here so I don’t have to spell it out for you.

Moving along.

Why do I offer the key party as an analogy for research collaborations? We know that building good research collaborations is hard but, sometimes, I think we don’t give enough attention to how difficult it actually is, in an emotional sense.

Guidelines to Grant Success

That was the easy bit by Jonathan O'Donnell on Flickr

There are three key points for efficient grant application writing:

1. Read the guidelines,
2. Read the guidelines, and
3. Read the guidelines.

Research developers like to trot this one out regularly. It usually gets a laugh (or an eye-roll, ymmv), but it’s TRUE.

I am a strong advocate of this mantra at the moment because university research offices around Australia are geared up for major Australian Research Council (ARC) funding rounds. ARC grants are arguably the most difficult and prestigious to land.

When talking with researchers about their applications (including using the ARC’s online system), I often have this experience:

[Five minutes into our meeting, where I feel like I'm not making much headway]

Me: [casually] So, you’ve read the funding rules and instructions to applicants, right?

*crickets*

That’s my ‘ah-hah’ moment. It explains why the researchers are having so much trouble getting started on an application, and why they don’t even know what headings to use.

Major grants are tricky beasts to wrangle no matter how many times you read the guidelines. However, funding bodies are generally clear  (often painstakingly clear) about what information they want from you and how you’re meant to present it. I alluded to the kinds of things guideline-reading can do for you in Research Grant Writing 101.

Here are five fab reasons why training yourself to read and digest each funding scheme’s information can make your life easier:

Respect the work

'Jonathan at work' on Flickr

Recently, I had someone provide me with a project plan called something like “research-plan-v15.doc”. They had done 15 versions of their project plan. In that time, they had completed exactly zero versions of the rest of the application. As a result, the application almost didn’t go in.

When we talked, it became apparent that they were stuck trying to refine the research question and describing the associated parts of the core ideas of their project. I know exactly where they were coming from. In my own tiny applications, I have often lost focus on the rest of the project because I had become obsessed with just one part of the process.

Here are some ideas for making sure you get your application in on time, every time.

Is it a real relationship? You and your industry partner

“Do you think they’ll call again?”

“Don’t look too keen!”

“Did you play hard to get?”

The process of finding an industry partner in research is often compared to forming a romantic relationship.

Analogies abound! Some internal schemes that encourage industry links are colloquially known as ‘wine and dine’ funds. Everyone talks about courting the industry partner, finding common ground, evaluating whether there’s a connective spark between the research team and organisation, and how one doesn’t talk about money too early.

I’ve been wary of using dating/wooing analogies in my posts. Maybe it’s my Women’s Studies 101 kicking in (hard) at the often sexist or exclusionary modes of representing these dynamics.

Maybe it’s because I never dated much.

I did read a fair share of Cosmo and Cleo in my teens, though, so I feel semi-qualified to dabble.

At the risk of morphing into a research Agony Aunt, these are my top 5 ways of knowing if what you have with your industry partner is worth it.

You know it’s the Real Thing when:

The nitty and the gritty

'in a dark place' by Jonathan O'Donnell on Flickr

How did you feel when you finished your last grant application? Let me guess: you were exhausted, running late, and sick of the sight of the thing.

Hold onto that feeling. Embrace it. Understand it.  Because that might have been how your assessors felt when they were reading your application.

They probably had a stack of applications too high to jump over, and reading them in the gaps between the rest of their life (i.e. late at night, when they were traveling, when they were tired). Unless you were very lucky, they might have been reading them piece-meal, a bit at a time. And they would have been rushing, because they needed to get their reports back in time and there were other things calling on their time.

As a result, they might not have been in top form when they reviewed your application.

But that’s enough about them; let’s get back to you!

“This application needed a good proof-read before being submitted.”

When you get a comment like that, it isn’t much comfort to remember that you only just submitted the application in time, an hour or so before the deadline. However, that is exactly the sort of thing that assessors say in their reports. Given that you’re asking for several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of funding, they have a point.

When an assessor is tired, or disappointed, or feels that you are wasting their time, they can often become quite critical.

Five elements of any application

Let there be holograms by Jonathan O'Donnell on Flickr

Tseen recently wrote about the basics of research grant applications. I thought that I would expand on that idea by listing the five things that I really want to see in every application. If any of these elements are missing, I’m afraid that bad things will happen to your application.

1. An idea

I’m not talking about the ‘get a clue’ type of idea here. I’m talking about a central tenet upon which your whole application hangs. The thing. The hook that will bring people on board and carry them through the journey of your application. The central driving force that will guide your whole project.

It is remarkably hard to express that central idea clearly and succinctly. Sometimes, it is too vague. You have the germ of an idea, but it hasn’t crystallised yet. There is no clear point, or nothing that will be attractive to a funder. An application to collect data without any clear path to a destination is often a project without a central driving force.

At other times, you might have the opposite problem: when you’re obsessed to the point of obscurity. You are too close, too involved, and you can’t articulate the central point clearly. Get help! Have someone else to read your writing critically, then help you to clarify your ideas. Argue about it. Play with it. Then start redrafting your application.

If that central idea is buried, or not expressed at all, reading the application becomes a chore. Without something to focus on, the reader tends to get lost. Because you haven’t caught the sympathy of the reader from the outset, you probably won’t hold their attention as they read.

Less is more: Cherishing White Space

This is a simple entry, one that tries to emulate its topic in form as well as content.

Too often, people present CVs or funding applications to me that make me break out in hives.

Why?

Because they’ve crammed as much information onto the A4 sheets as possible, and the result is intimidatingly solid slabs of text, page after page.

When compiling these academic documents, you must learn to cherish white space.

You’re expecting people to assess or review the document, and take away the gist of it after a quick skim, so let them absorb it as easily as possible. For example, after glancing through your impeccably prepared CV, readers should have a snapshot of who you are: what you do, where you come from (institutionally and intellectually), how much you’ve achieved, and who else thinks you’re great (i.e. your referees).

For major competitive grants the members of the expert panels who usher your applications through have to deal with a HEAP of paperwork; the assessors will also have a big pile of applications, possibly one scheme after another, for which they have to provide in-depth feedback and rankings. Chances are that these tasks are done on the fly, slotted around all the other work that dutiful academics do.

Anything you can do to help them judge well and accurately is a Good Thing.

To Prof, or not to Prof

There are some days when you just know you’re inviting the pitching of rotten cabbages.

I hope this is not one of them.

I’ve attended a large number of early career researcher (ECR) events in recent times as RMIT University has a new and active ECR Network (login required), which is finding its feet, prioritising what it might do, and all those other exciting things that take place when initiatives take flight. The great thing that I’ve seen happen is ECRs feeling more empowered by knowledge and excited about their career plans and research activities. Most importantly, in my view, they also start seeing what it means to show research leadership and foster a positive research environment.

I’m speaking in this post mostly from my own experiences in academia as a research fellow, and as someone who started a research network where membership is overwhelmingly from PhD students and other ECRs. Over the years, as I’ve listened to extremely accomplished professorial researchers, ECRs, professional staff, and academic consultants, there has been a refrain that has become louder. It has always bothered me, and now it’s bothered me enough that you get a post about it.

That refrain is:

For ECRs to get anywhere, they must resign themselves to years of intellectual and organisational exploitation by senior academics.

For example, the refrain says that ECRs should expect to:

• Do most of the work in any collaboration.
• Assume that they must put senior colleagues’ names first on grants and publications.
• Cultivate ‘up’ so that established researchers will want to work with you.
• Have to do research ‘freebies’ for senior academics to lay the foundations for future collaborative possibilities.

I’m not saying that any of these things are necessarily heinous acts, but ECRs may benefit from taking a step back to consider their broader research plans and strategies before bowing to what they are told is the inevitable.