CD2H Administration Core

Leadership

Director: Melissa Haendel

Co-Director: Julie McMurry

Education Director: Shannon McWeeney

Other Core Members

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Year 3 Budget

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Specific Aim

The Administrative core aims to provide program management support for the CD2H program internally, to coordinate and engage the community externally, provide educational materials and informatics solutions to education dissemination, and to provide overarching guidance to the strategically themed cores to help them succeed.

Research Strategy

Significance

Program management is often under resourced or otherwise dismissed as a significant need, and we too did not anticipate the significance of this need. Especially with a program as complex as CD2H, coordinating informatics for 59 CTSA hubs from 9 internal sites, we require sophisticated management, communication, and reporting functions.

Innovation

Our innovation is a combination of two things: "teams of teams", and "single source of truth."

CD2H organizational structure is now in 5 thematic cores, each with individual projects and project teams and team leads within them. This gives everyone a chance to lead and to collaborate, but to do so in smaller, effective, nimble teams.

Our information management approach is a "single source of truth". We aim to generate content once and repurpose and distribute or filter it in other locations as needed. This is everything from onboarding to pivot tables for budgeting views.

Justification and Feasibility

Our original approach of having a fully distributed set of committees to manage the program was not as effective, transparent, communicative, or accountable as we needed given the complexity of the program, and we believe necessitated the creation of an Administrative core.

We have demonstrated early successes in improved program management with these approaches (see progress below).

Summary of existing system and findings

See the Github Project management repositories, and the CD2H Labs project dashboard.

Approach

Communications

• Implement new organizational structure that has community and internal coordination strategies
• Develop corresponding slack, email lists, and meeting schedules that are aligned to the new organizational structure
• Develop project management strategies that push information rather than depending on verbal communications
• Include NCATS, Operations, and Hub members in as many contexts as possible
• Create internal homepage with all relevant links, and weekly mailer of activities and deadlines

Engagement

• All projects are required to have a hub engagement plan and include hub members; Admin core will help projects and cores decide how to best engage, make connections, and support tracking and communications
• Coordinate new governance and project prioritization process that better enables the community to make suggestions for projects, to be coordinated, and to determine how CD2H resources will be spent.
• Hire a web developer to implement a more suitable and engaging website that works well with Github projects and with other third party apps.
• Hire an Engagement Officer, write an engagement plan, Twitter, newsletters, coordination with CLIC, etc.
• Plan and coordinate hub visits
• Leverage DREAM IDEA competition to engage hubs that don’t “win” to do projects with us (we did have 25 hubs participate!)
• Create a library of slides/PR materials for use by team members

Work Tracking

• Implement and manage Github repos for each project to use for their work, with clearly defined deliverables, milestones, and tickets
• Implement and manage dashboards that have overview views of progress, provide notifications, and support community involvement
• Implement and manage improved project management of people, using onboarding forms and person classification
• Implement a dashboard view for the website so that our community can see what we are doing, hold us accountable, and participate more readily
• Document deliverables with clear descriptions of what constitutes delivery

Content management

• Clean up the documents that we have, archiving a lot of them. Set up processes to be collect-and-reuse/update.
• Provide training for operations team members (see MTIP training materials, for example). Send out instructions to navigate and best practices for future.
• Create places for people to put things. Put more project work in Github.

Demonstrated value

• The cores aim to deliver end-to-end solutions in strategic areas. Together, a multi-PI and site PI will be responsible for coordinating each core and for the success of the projects in their core.
• The value of each project will be assessed as part of the evaluation plan for each project and will include community coordination and impact. Overarching indicators (such as number of community members involved) will be captured by the Admin core.

Progress Report

Communications:

• Each project has an engagement plan with ways for the community to get involved or stay abreast.
• Each project has a slack channel.
• The internal homepage and weekly mailer have been implemented.
• New onboarding form allows internal and external members to be onboarded to the correct lists, calendars, slack, and github repos.

Engagement:

• We have increased our hub visits and their inclusion in projects
• We have had very successful community webinars/meetings
• iDTF and CTSA steering committee conversations have facilitated partnerships
• DREAM IDEA competition had 31 applications from 25 CTSAs

Work tracking:

• Each project now has a GitHub repo, with well defined deliverables, milestones, and information about the project
• New dashboard highlights progress overall

Content management:

• We organized the google doc collection, and are piloting a new Gsuite instance for NCATS
• We have provided training on project management and document management

Demonstrated value:

• We had two publications, one of which demonstrated partnerships with external hubs and multiple CD2H sites
• External hubs are adopting some of our software tools (Leaf, LOINC2HPO)
• We have demonstrated value in the clinical data model harmonization arena, and in the terminological space (Health Open Terminologies)

Current Projects

• Operational architecture (internal project) (RPPR)