Overall Objective: To understand the current situation regarding financials, facilities, equipment access, and grant costing, which impacts the Faculty’s cost recovery, and determine how these could be improved. Key objectives include:

1. PGR – Establish and implement processes to ensure PGR offers have correctly assigned fee bands. Review policies associated with our own and visiting PGRs, including their access to high-cost facilities and equipment, and implement necessary changes.
2. Costing and Pricing – Ensure the Research Services team effectively supports academics in preparing accurately costed bids, incorporating input from technical teams and other PS resources, and submitting them within approval timelines.
3. Leadership Engagement – Ensure leadership teams engage with and understand the importance of these issues to embed accountability and improve compliance with all elements of cost recovery.
4. Culture and Behaviour – Raise awareness and foster behavioral change across academic, PS, and Technical Operations involved in research, ensuring effective and accurate cost recovery to support the faculty’s long-term financial sustainability.

Research Services

Development of a user-focused SharePoint site with an interactive timeline for academics, which, alongside the Research Services Team, supports them through every step of the research proposal process. Additionally, the team developed their own SharePoint, enabling them to share the most up-to-date information from funders, policy changes, etc., providing the best advice to academic colleagues.

Costing for PS and Technical Operations

The project team reviewed and updated policies and guidance on costings for technical and professional services within grant proposals.

FSE Doctoral Academy

Working with the PPMS/TRAC workstream, the FSE Doctoral Academy established a process to ensure prospective PGR students are assigned to the correct fee band to cover expected research costs. A new process has also been established to ensure that PGR access to facilities and equipment is recovered against a research grant or other funding stream.

Behaviour and Communication Campaign

Building a behaviour and communication campaign was essential to convey the project's goals. The campaign targeted two key audiences:

Leadership

Engaging leadership was critical as they are the approvers for policies related to cost recovery, playing a vital role in achieving the project outcomes. Initiatives included:

• Engagement sessions with the Faculty’s extended leadership team, including away days.
• Communications from the Dean outlining roles and responsibilities.
• Standard slide decks for Heads of Department to use at departmental staff meetings to share key messages and actions.

Research Active Academics

Efforts to engage research active academics included:

• Targeted emails to PGR supervisors covering changes to PGR fee setting and their roles.
• Faculty-wide messages from the Dean to all staff (PS and Academic).
• Multiple placements of key messages in academic-focused channels (research newsletter, funding bulletin, etc.).
• Broadcast messaging across Faculty-wide channels.
• Responding to questions raised and using these as ‘news hooks’ to push messages on broadcast channels or produce targeted updates to specific groups.

The financial benefits of this project will become evident in the next 3–5 years due to the nature and cycle of research funding and PGR programmes. However, the work undertaken will enable the Faculty to achieve its stretching financial targets with respect to research contribution.

Learnings to Date

Maintaining open dialogue has allowed the project team to respond to all questions and improve published guidance. Financial gains are not immediate, requiring a long lead time due to the lag between research applications being submitted, grants being awarded, and subsequent expenditure. Managing expectations has been a key part of the communication and engagement process.

The project aligns with the University's EDI strategy by standardising processes for costing and access to facilities to ensure fairness.

The full financial benefit of this project will be realised over the coming financial years. Workstreams have established a firm foundation to ensure:

• Grant proposals are accurately costed.
• Consistent and fair fee banding and access fees for our own and visiting PGRs.
• Facilities and equipment usage can be booked and monitored.
• Leadership teams are supportive and understand their roles in ensuring cost recovery.

The next stage involves sharing learnings to date with other Faculty teams (BMH and Humanities) and widening the scope to look at high power computing facilities usage and recovery.

A new university-wide project called One Research Facility (ORF) will shortly be launched to continue the work started in FSE and will aim to further develop facility usage understanding and resource optimisation. In summary this project will include:

• Developing methods to measure and analyse facility usage, reporting usage accurately to facilitate efficient cost recovery.
• Establishing systems for cataloguing facilities and equipment with unique identifiers for accurate tracking.
• Supporting the Technical Commitment Framework, recognizing and crediting technical specialists for their contributions, improving recognition and career development, and promoting a supportive research environment.

For further information, please contact: 

• Gemma Lyons, Director of Finance - Faculty of Science & Engineering