What is the Management Toolkit?

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In 2019, the UK Prevention Research Partnership (UKPRP) funded eight new collaborations to progress research in non-communicable disease primary prevention. Four large national consortia and four networks were established as a result followed by another three Consortia in July 2021.

Governance approaches vary

Whilst, the aim of the networks is to build collaboration and partnerships as the foundation for future research proposals in under-researched fields, Consortia are established as research projects (sometimes programmes of research) to build evidence in key areas of prevention research.

Since their inception, each of the Consortia & Networks funded in the first round have established their own mechanisms for governance and contracting, in addition to the relevant policies and strategies for a wide range of functions, which suits their individual needs. There is limited guidance available to support the development of interdisciplinary networks and consortia, although guidance does exist for interdisciplinary working more generally (e.g. Gavens et al. 2017), for academics working with industry (RA-Map Consortium et al. 2018) and for project management (e.g. Odiaka et al. 2018).

Existing evidence for good practice?

There is a distinct paucity of evidence on good practice in an academic environment, those involved in the UKPRP projects started to share ideas across different areas of research management, to identify good practice and learnings from teams other than our own, and to improve our own practice by learning from those inside and outside of the UK Prevention Partnership funded projects. We reflected how beneficial it would have been to share ideas, templates and learning much earlier in our development and formulated the proposal to collate and share this toolkit.

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This toolkit reflects the learning and experiences of the eight project managers and co-ordinators who have previously operated across a range of disciplines.  However,  we are not claiming that it outlines the definitive best practice, or that the templates and guidance will work perfectly for all projects or every situation you may encounter. Every multi-disciplinary project is unique and shaped by the needs of the Funder, the Principal Investigator and the wider research team.  This means that there is no one size-fits-all approach and so not all of the recommendations, policies or strategies outlined will be appropriate for every project. And there is always more to learn!  

Aim of this resource

The aim of this toolkit is to provide new (and existing) research networks, consortia and other collaborations with templates and guidance that could be useful when setting up and managing these kinds of research endeavours. The purpose is to share learning and provide a starting point from which groups can build solid management foundations to support networking and research activity in academia.

This resource will provide a set of general guidance to enable project managers and leadership teams to consider all options & scenarios and subsequently adopt their governance and  management approaches that are most appropriate to their needs. 

We hope that having access to the materials in this toolkit, and reflecting on the guiding questions and requirements within your own teams, will enable others to develop governance, contracting, policy and strategy documents that meet the needs of their groups a little quicker and easier than might have been possible alone.