I recently shared thoughts on applying the principles of High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) to research administration, framing our work as an adjacent high-reliability function. But what happens when you’re operating within a highly decentralized institution, school, or college where sweeping ch...

For years, research administration has been stuck in the same unproductive debates—centralization vs. decentralization, administrative burden vs. compliance, homegrown tech vs. third-party. We argue over structures and approaches as if one model will solve all problems when, in reality, the ground b...

Research administration is bogged down by outdated, manual processes. While other industries embrace innovation, universities and hospitals have lagged in tech solutions and hesitate to adopt third-party tech due to [valid?] financial data security concerns. But this caution comes at a cost: adminis...

The federal government is undergoing an unprecedented shakeup: mass firings of federal workers, funding freezes, and policy shifts that include proposals to cap indirect costs for universities and research institutes at 15%. The research funding landscape is changing rapidly, and research administra...

This is the first in a series of essays on strategy, planning, and organizational design in higher education. It is intentionally diagnostic by naming the problem and sets up the question the subsequent pieces work through. If you want the framework first, start with Sequence Is Everything and retur...

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Leonardo  Da Vinci

If research administrators could distill the management and administration of grant portfolios and department operations into a single word, I imagine complex would be the most common endorsement. Some complexity is inherent in the pr...

For many academic departments, centers, and units with a research mission, focusing on their core objective can be frustrating, messy, and exhausting. Research administrators often deal with complicated email threads discussing changes in project effort, managing reporting requirements, questions ab...