With new staff on board and in the pipeline for this fiscal year, the Office of Strategic Operations, led by Senior Director, Lisa Wilson, builds momentum in expanding research training, communications, quality improvement, and project management services to help ensure operational excellence, research administrators’ success, and maximize ORA’s contributions to the research enterprise.
Research Training & Communications
Leading the Research Training Team, Associate Director Tricia Callahan is adding a grant life-cycle subject matter expert (SME) trainer and a curriculum design specialist to the team this year. Within the coming months, the new unit will roll out two major projects; a CRA Study Group to assist ORA colleagues with preparing for the Research Administrators Certification Council (RACC) exam and an ORA Boot Camp to provide a series of intensive professional development workshops for seasoned and early career research administrators. In early March, the Research Training Team will facilitate the second round of central HR’s Leadership & Organizational Development (LO&D) training for cohorts 3 & 4. Ashley Myers, Training Design & Communications Manager, facilitates professional development training and produces communications for the training team and ORA. She works closely with colleagues to produce and distribute the ORA newsletters, special reports, and executive communications. In the coming months, the new team will create a robust training website that works as a centralized training hub and includes research administrator and leadership continuing education opportunities. Initiatives are underway to streamline the tracking and reporting of continuing education hours in research administration and to provide a seamless onboarding and training plan designed to engage and situate new employees for success in Emory’s research administration academy. As educational resources are developed and new initiatives are launched, look for them to be added to the new Research Training & Communications website.
Process & Quality Improvement
NASA began using the term “Tiger Team” circa 1960, defining the idiom as a small group of experts charged with solving complex, real-world problems. A Tiger Team’s mission is to provide continuous process and quality improvement support services and quickly move on to the next improvement project. Replicating this proven and effective model in 2019, ORA created the Dragon Team, a small group of quality improvement experts with similar skills and a passion for addressing and resolving operational challenges. This team of dedicated professionals, led by Director Inger Garnett, supports the department’s motto, “Whatever it takes”! Like Tiger Teams, Garnett’s team is given wide, cross-functional latitude to stretch operating rules and bypass bureaucracy, to solve mission-critical problems. The team works with the departments to facilitate process improvement initiatives, identify solutions, and quickly move on to the next initiative, which results in a continuous improvement environment. This Summer, two new Strategic Operations Associates, Valeria Rainey, and Davion Johnson, joined the Dragon Team. Leveraging Rainey’s and Johnson’s research administration expertise and the Six Sigma expertise of Strategic Operations Associates Sharon Jones and Nicole George, the Dragon Team is now leading more than ten process and quality improvement projects across ORA. Within the coming months, the recently expanded team will focus on improving Post-Awards closeout policies and procedures, RAS process improvement, and vetting a new grants management system to streamline the proposal development and award management lifecycle. If you have an idea for a process improvement, submit a request at https://sot.emory.edu/strategic-operations/index.html.
Project Management
To meet the demand for continuous process improvement, research training, and communications services, SOT is slowly yet systematically building a project management team. The team’s foremost responsibility is to create an infrastructure and system that allows for a standardized view of ORA’s major projects. SOT recently rolled out the Planview Project Management (PPM Pro) platform to progress towards this big lofty goal and is using it to facilitate two major projects: the ORA Business Continuity (BC) and the PEDs Process Improvement projects re-launch. Tubal Yisrael, the SOT project support specialist, joined the team on October 3, 2022. He facilitates the launch of PPM Pro across SOT and manages the Fusion Frameworks business continuity project.
Project Manager April Carswell, Ph.D., manages VPRA Robert Nobles’ projects and special initiatives. In the coming months, Dr. Carswell will lead the development and implementation of the ORA FY24-25 Strategic Action Plan. In addition to her project management responsibilities, she will support the VPRA with building and enhancing partnerships with Emory Researchers, Centers, Institutes, and External Partners. Created in 2020, SOT’s mission is to facilitate the Vice President for Research Administration’s efforts to operationalize the ORA-wide strategy and create a robust and resilient research infrastructure. The SOT leads working groups to support and ensure integration, transparency, and efficiencies across RAS, OSP, RGC, OTT, and OCR and the award transition across systems and business units.
With this highly functional team of leaders and practitioners in place and the success of the inaugural ORA Research Week 2022 in our rearview mirror (presentation slides are now available), SOT is well-positioned to expand process improvement and research administrator professional development services to meet the needs of our growing research enterprise. To learn more, visit the SOT website, https://sot.emory.edu/.