Recently, I read this Euroscientist article about Death in academia and the mis-measurement of science that echoed with my current job but even more with my experience of research lab director and manager for researchers and wanted to share this experience with you.
For researchers and research teams the "publish or perish" mantra and its translation to "acquire funding or die" are among the main coffee corner topics. Nobody will deny that Research KPIs, Analytics, BI are becoming pervasive within the Education and Research industry and the questions about this are numerous:
The truth probably resides in the way these types of metrics are used and this blog does not pretend to answer this question but to focus on the translation of these KPIs to researchers and more precisely in the context of how Management by Objectives (MBO), one of the cornerstone of the talent management within the SAP HR solution suite, both OnPremise and Cloud, can support researchers and research teams.
More than a decade ago - it took me, as a researcher, some time to understand what was the purpose of my first meeting to define my “objectives”. I was capable of managing my own time and resources and knew what was good for me, so why did my 'manager' want me to devote precious time to this unwanted task ?
Yes I know I have to publish (I was never very good at), yes I should acquire funded projects (I was rather good at that this and I may write some of my techniques in the next blog),and yes I do have to 'disseminate/sell' my research within the company ...
So let's take a step back and explain how Management by Objectives is done in a (industrial) research organization.
Our implementation of MBO was relatively straightforward and followed a standard company process, spanning the full year and consisted theoretically in this way:
The only tricky part was to map organizational wide objectives with research objectives and of course the objectives should be 'SMART' – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely, covering a relatively short period for researchers (eg. one year). To achieve I used a two dimensional canvas:
To enable a fair evaluation, some KPIs were included covering the different domains (eg. publication, patent, proposals, # of dissemination events) some of them at individual levels some of them at team level.
Also it was possible at any period of the year to talk about the objectives and potentially adjust targets and was used only by few people in case of unforeseen events, for example the departure of a team member.
Still, as you can imagine, researchers like to challenge you and I had numerous discussions with different people within and outside the team. Here is a collection of arguments that was often stated
To be fair, the management by objective was only rarely tackling research topics per se- this was addressed in more informal meeting or at team/strategy level except for rare cases of "self‐interest” based research. I neither do believe that it had a direct, short-term, impact on scientific excellence except for some researchers that were too humble to target highly ranked conferences (and get them !). But in the mid-term, it enables to better guide your organization or team, to adjust the effort to acquire new funding to the appropriate level, and to value skills and involvement that were under the radar of impact factor or the H-index.
After more than a decade of practice including becoming the manager of researchers and, surprisingly after my first reaction, I believe that it is good within Research and exhibit advantages:
Management by objective is now a widely adopted best practice and Research Institutions will continue to adopt to align its mission and priorities with its most valued resource – researchers and research teams. Further there is no evidence that adoption MBO has a negative impact on scientific excellence but instead helps focus research teams and researchers on goals already agreed upon and provides greater visibility to the organization.
To paraphrase Rabelais "l’évaluation de la science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme"!
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