{"id":283,"date":"2011-11-13T22:59:51","date_gmt":"2011-11-13T22:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/?p=283"},"modified":"2011-11-13T22:59:51","modified_gmt":"2011-11-13T22:59:51","slug":"estimating-investigator-and-researcher-time-on-a-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/?p=283","title":{"rendered":"Estimating Investigator and Researcher Time on a Project"},"content":{"rendered":"
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PS: Time is also overheads<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Prompted in part by an interesting discussion of the importance of the budget in establishing the overall credibility and shape of a research proposal at the ever-excellent Research Whisperer<\/a>, I thought I’d put fingers-to-keyboard on the vexed issue of estimating staff time on research grant applications.\u00a0 Partly this is to share some of what I do and what I recommend, but mostly it’s to ask others how they approach it. Comments, thoughts, suggestions, and experiences welcome as ever in the comments below.<\/p>\n

Estimating staff time is by some distance the hardest part of the budget, and often when I discuss this with academic colleagues, we end up in a kind of “I dunno, what do you reckon?” impasse.\u00a0 (I should say that it’s me who speaks like that, not them).\u00a0 I’ve never been involved in a research project (other than my ‘desk research’ MPhil), so I’ve really no idea, and I don’t have any particular insight into how long certain tasks will take.\u00a0 Career young academics, and the increasing number of academics who have never had the opportunity to lead on a research project, have little experience to draw upon, and even those who have experience seem to find it difficult.\u00a0 I can understand that, because I’d find it difficult too.\u00a0 If someone where to ask me how estimate how much time I spent over the course of a year on (say) duties related to my role as School Research Ethics Officer, I’d struggle to give them in answer in terms of a percentage FTE or in terms of a total number of working days.<\/p>\n

It’s further complicated by the convenient fiction that academic staff work the standard five day weeks, and 37.5 hour working weeks.\u00a0 Even those who don’t regularly work evenings and weekends will almost certainly have flexible working patterns that make it even harder to estimate how long something will take.\u00a0 This means that the standard units of staff time that are most often used – total days and percentage of full time – aren’t straightforwardly convertible from one currency to the other.\u00a0 To make matters worse, some European funding sources seem to prefer ‘person months’.\u00a0 Rather than the standard working week, I think this probably reflects the reality of academic work in many institutions:<\/p>\n