Guide to Advanced Empirical
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- 5.4.3 Access to participants
| 5.4.2 The decision-making and management process Since empirical research projects, especially long-duration ones, rarely proceed as initially planned, there need to be agreements about how changes to plans will be made. We believe that an active-risk management approach is needed At the initial stages, the risks (see Sect. 4) need to be identified and their magnitude estimated. When researchers and company managers meet on a semi-regular basis, both progress and the risk profile should be informally reviewed and changes to the plans agreed. Risk management was something with which the university researchers had little experience at the start of the Mitel-CSER project. As the project progressed and deviated from the original plans (albeit in parallel with significant success, we did not do a good job of ensuring that both parties clearly understood the reasons for the deviations. University researchers may well be able to learn from the managerial expertise of the company in this regard, just as the company can learn from the technological expertise of the researchers. At one point we went too far in the opposite direction by regularly updating a detailed project plan. That turned out to be far too time-consuming with not enough benefit. We now believe the kind of regular management needed should involve update and discussion of a very brief progress chart, and a shortlist of successes, problems and risks. 5.4.3 Access to participants Both sides need to agree on how many employees will participate in the study and how much time is required from each employee. Sometimes an organization will find it difficult to provide the personnel required by the ideal research design and some compromise maybe necessary. In our project, Mitel agreed to a certain number of employee-hours per year to be devoted to our project, but we did not accurately monitor this, and likely used 10 The Management of University–Industry Collaborations somewhat less time than budgeted. A key point for Mitel was that before the researchers initiated meetings with employees, they would check with management to see who was busy with critical or deadline work, and avoid these employees until they had more time. Download 1.5 Mb. Share with your friends:
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