Strategy
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We’ve structured and organised Work Package 1 based on the increasing need for openness, transparency, and reproducibility in research. Work Package 1 will deliver the day-to-day project and operations management of all the work packages, as well as facilitating the close collaboration and joint development of expertise across all seven Steno Centers.
To achieve effective and optimal coordination and management of a complex project like this, we will employ resources and tools developed and tested at the Steno Diabetes Center Aarhus in the past years (1–5) to offer a practical framework for sharing knowledge and technical skills across centres, which will deliver “better research done in less time” (6) while following reproducible and open scientific practices.
Guiding principles
One of the initial steps in the strategy involves developing and implementing general principles that will guide collaboration and work across the Steno Centers. This ensures we have a basis for following a common approach to working and communicating together when managing the work packages. While we will finalise and refine the principles during the first year of the project, below are some principles that will form the basis for all other principles.
- Assume openness with as many things as possible, including communication.
- Implement openness as much as possible, excluding personal and sensitive data.
- Disseminate as many steps of the research lifecycle as possible, including non-traditional outputs (e.g. protocols or standard operating procedures).
- Implement as much as possible explicit analyses and data processing/management using code-based and programmatic pipeline/workflow management.
Specifics of the strategy
Expanding on the strategies listed on the landing page, the below describes more of the details about the specific strategies from a technical or digital perspective. Specific activities and tasks are shown below in Figure 1. Many of these activities and strategies will get support and contributions from the Seedcase Project team at Steno Aarhus, who regularly use and refine many of these practices in their work.
Project management
While general project management and coordination will be done by the management group, the technical strategy for the project management will involve applying iterative and incremental methods often used in software development, such as Agile-inspired methods. Practically, this involves:
- Using time-bound “iterations” that has a specific aim to complete, where tasks are assigned that work toward completing this aim. This may involve having iterations be on a monthly basis.
- Using a (digital) project board to track tasks, their status, who is assigned to what, with issues or discussions connected to each task.
- Having regular “reflection” meetings to identify things that work and things to improve on in our collaboration and management.
Collaborative practices
Building an effective collaboration between groups, centers, and people requires agreeing to a set of common practices that we all adhere to. In this way, we’ll develop a description of basic standards and practices that we will discuss, refine, and agree on during the first year of the project. These documents will be living documents that we will post publicly on this website. Concretely, some practices may be:
- Using a common set of tools for communication that works for everyone.
- Using relevant communication channels dependent on the purpose, for example, extended discussions of a specific task should be done where the task is listed.
Research operations
The aim of research operations is to optimise day-to-day work in order to minimise time and effort spent per unit of output. This often integrates software engineering and data engineering work to accomplish the operational task. Concretely, this may include:
- Automatically converting our documentation in easy to share and search websites.
- Regularly and actively seeking out areas of the research lifecycle that can be simplified, streamlined, or automated by incorporating dedicated meetings or reviews to uncover these areas to optimise. Then, based on this information, working to implement a solution.
- Identifying and documenting the resources, limitations, and barriers on cross-Steno collaboration practices and processes to minimize their impact on the project.
Software development
Research output includes more than just papers and presentations. It also includes analytic methods implemented as software packages. When work packages, such as Work Package 2, build or work on an analytic method, we will ensure that work with them to develop the software in a robust, well-designed, reliable, and maintainable way. Concretely, some activities may include:
- Developing a template for building the software package that includes best practices for software development.
Data engineering
Data engineering is the practice of designing, structuring, and building data infrastructures and pipelines that support the collection and storage of high-quality data. Part of the aim of the Seedcase Project is in building software tools to help with creating and managing data and metadata in a way that applies FAIR principles and that simplifies the tasks that researchers have with requesting and working with the data. So the Seedcase team will be heavily involved in these tasks.
Technical working group
To help facilitate the technical and digital strategies so that they are achievable, we will establish a technical working group. More details about this group is found in the Groups page.
Training
A major component of Work Package 1 is in training and upskilling activities. We will accomplish these by collaborating with the NNF-funded software and training-based Seedcase Project (4) as well as with the expertise we’ve developed at Steno Aarhus over the years. Training will include both formal and informal activities that focus on skills not often taught to researchers, such as data engineering, modern collaborative practices, and iterative project management methods.