How to Streamline Research Lifecycle Management
Efficiency, transparency, and compliance are essential components of research lifecycle management. Managing a research project is often more complex than teams expect, involving funding applications, ethical issues, and the actual delivery of the project. Streamlining workflows with automated research processes enables research institutions to continue working on their projects without being delayed by regulatory approvals or menial admin tasks.
Research Lifecycle Management
What Is Research Lifecycle Management?
Research lifecycle management is the structure by which a research project is co-ordinated. It involves overseeing the research process throughout all its stages, from initial concepts to delivery and reporting. Streamlined processes help manage projects both financially and legally, from securing funding to obtaining ethics approvals, and ensuring legal compliance.
Effective management of the research lifecycle is a stepping stone to responsible, transparent and impactful research. Automated research processes help institutions stay on top of their commitments and responsibilities while delivering groundbreaking, community-impacting research. Research administration and management software keeps researchers accountable while providing them with the tools and support they need for success.
Challenges in Research Lifecycle Management
Even with some processes in place, institutions can face challenges in managing research projects smoothly. One of the most common issues is fragmentation, where important information is spread across multiple departments or duplicated across systems.
Administrative loads are another roadblock in research lifecycle management. Compliance paperwork, ethics applications and funding forms all take researchers away from their projects. Issues compound when a project spans multiple institutions or jurisdictions, each requiring separate applications.
Despite their inefficiency, manual processes are still prevalent in many research projects. While manual workflows can lead to delays, it is the errors they are often responsible for that have the greatest potential to derail entire projects. Institutions that can't track project progress may struggle to keep up with key regulations or approvals. They might also miss early signs of risks. If a project progresses unknowingly, it may be rejected entirely if it does not meet compliance criteria.
How to Streamline Research Lifecycle Management
Centralised research management platforms
One of the easiest ways to streamline research workflows is to implement a centralised platform for storing and managing all project assets. It acts as a single source of information for all researchers and stakeholders involved in the project, housing funding applications, ethics approvals, and completed project files.
When everything is stored in one place, researchers and administrators have full visibility over their projects. All information is updated in real time, which reduces the risk of double handling to near zero. It also keeps research and leadership teams aligned on the project's progress.
OmniStar’s automated research administration and management software is designed to provide administrators and creatives with structure and alignment, enabling complex project lifecycles to be controlled effectively.
Automated workflows
Automated research processes are powerful tools that fast-track ethics approvals, document generation, and compliance checks. OmniStar’s research management software automates these routine tasks in the background, enabling researchers to prioritise project execution.
Using OmniStar’s automated features, ethics applications can be automatically routed to the appropriate committee for approval. Built-in milestones can trigger reminders or notifications, while funding applications can also be tracked in real-time to keep projects moving without bottlenecks from outdated, manual processes.
Using automated workflow software, research institutions should expect to see faster turnaround times and fewer errors in their management processes.
Reporting and analytics
Good decisions are supported by clear, concise data. With strong analytics capabilities, institutions can monitor progress, measure success, and plan more effectively.
Real-time performance metrics on grant approvals, ethics reviews, and research outputs highlight the progress of each project and whether attention or funding should be diverted to other areas.
Customised reports can be generated quickly with OmniStar, creating datasets suitable for internal planning and regulatory compliance. Access to this data can also help institutions in pitching for further funding or larger projects, demonstrating the value and impact of their research.
Budgeting and accounting for overhead costs
Effective financial management is essential to the success of research projects, especially if funding is to be sought from multiple parties. Automated systems like OmniStar streamline financial management for research institutions, keeping projects in-budget and financially compliant.
Real-time tracking enables teams to see exactly how much has been spent and how funds were allocated, while automated tools calculate overheads based on the requirements of each funding agreement. Automated research processes reduce bottlenecks and inform managerial decisions.
Governance and approvals
Strong research governance processes keep projects accountable and ethical, both within institutions and from an external perspective. Meanwhile, streamlined approval workflows ensure each decision involves the right team of people, maximising efficiency.
OmniStar’s research platform can be configured to support numerous types of projects and approval structures. Digital signatures are one of the easiest ways to increase efficiency while maintaining security, while detailed audit trails record what has been approved and when.
By integrating governance with effective financial management, ethical compliance, and reporting practices, OmniStar’s research management platform ensures information flows to the right teams in real-time.
Ethics approval management
Ethics is a core component of any research project involving human participants. Thorough ethics management helps keep research institutions compliant, and their projects running efficiently. However, fulfilling these obligations can be a time-consuming process.
OmniStar can be configured to automate a range of tasks relating to ethics management, including automatically identifying requirements based on project details. Researchers and administrators can track ethics applications in one place. The platform also provides real-time status updates and keeps version-controlled documents to ensure accountability.
Effective ethics management has a significant impact on the broader workflow of the project, enabling institutions to proceed with their research without hindrance from delays caused by non-compliance.
Streamline Research Lifecycle Management with OmniStar
Research institutions must balance executing their projects with financial, ethical, and legal management. These demands highlight the need for a smarter, more streamlined approach to research lifecycle management; one which brings all elements of the project together in a single location and eliminates manual workflows.
OmniStar is designed to meet numerous research management challenges faced by institutions, whether they concern funding, reporting, tracking or ethics. It brings together all parts of the research lifecycle in one configurable platform, empowering research teams to deliver results on time, on budget, and with lasting impact.
For more information on how OmniStar’s research management could work for your research institution, contact us to book a demo.
