Research Computing Services The Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide

About The Art of Service

The Art of Service, Business Process Architects since 2000, is dedicated to helping stakeholders achieve excellence.

Defining, designing, creating, and implementing a process to solve a stakeholders challenge or meet an objective is the most valuable role… In EVERY group, company, organization and department.

Unless you’re talking a one-time, single-use project, there should be a process. Whether that process is managed and implemented by humans, AI, or a combination of the two, it needs to be designed by someone with a complex enough perspective to ask the right questions.

Someone capable of asking the right questions and step back and say, ‘What are we really trying to accomplish here? And is there a different way to look at it?’

With The Art of Service’s Standard Requirements Self-Assessments, we empower people who can do just that — whether their title is marketer, entrepreneur, manager, salesperson, consultant, Business Process Manager, executive assistant, IT Manager, CIO etc... —they are the people who rule the future. They are people who watch the process as it happens, and ask the right questions to make the process work better.

Contact us when you need any support with this Self-Assessment and any help with templates, blue-prints and examples of standard documents you might need:

http://theartofservice.com

[email protected]

Acknowledgments

This checklist was developed under the auspices of The Art of Service, chaired by Gerardus Blokdyk.

Representatives from several client companies participated in the preparation of this Self-Assessment.

Our deepest gratitude goes out to Matt Champagne, Ph.D. Surveys Expert, for his invaluable help and advise in structuring the Self Assessment.

Mr Champagne can be contacted at

http://matthewchampagne.com/

In addition, we are thankful for the design and printing services provided.

Included Resources - how to access

Included with your purchase of the book is the Research Computing Services Self-Assessment Spreadsheet Dashboard which contains all questions and Self-Assessment areas and auto-generates insights, graphs, and project RACI planning - all with examples to get you started right away.

Get it now- you will be glad you did - do it now, before you forget.

How? Simply send an email to [email protected] with this books’ title in the subject to get the Research Computing Services Self Assessment Tool right away.

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Purpose of this Self-Assessment

This Self-Assessment has been developed to improve understanding of the requirements and elements of Research Computing Services, based on best practices and standards in business process architecture, design and quality management.

It is designed to allow for a rapid Self-Assessment to determine how closely existing management practices and procedures correspond to the elements of the Self-Assessment.

The criteria of requirements and elements of Research Computing Services have been rephrased in the format of a Self-Assessment questionnaire, with a seven-criterion scoring system, as explained in this document.

In this format, even with limited background knowledge of Research Computing Services, a manager can quickly review existing operations to determine how they measure up to the standards. This in turn can serve as the starting point of a ‘gap analysis’ to identify management tools or system elements that might usefully be implemented in the organization to help improve overall performance.

How to use the Self-Assessment

On the following pages are a series of questions to identify to what extent your Research Computing Services initiative is complete in comparison to the requirements set in standards.

To facilitate answering the questions, there is a space in front of each question to enter a score on a scale of ‘1’ to ‘5’.

1 Strongly Disagree

2 Disagree

3 Neutral

4 Agree

5 Strongly Agree

Read the question and rate it with the following in front of mind:

‘In my belief,

the answer to this question is clearly defined’.

There are two ways in which you can choose to interpret this statement;

1.how aware are you that the answer to the question is clearly defined

2.for more in-depth analysis you can choose to gather evidence and confirm the answer to the question. This obviously will take more time, most Self-Assessment users opt for the first way to interpret the question and dig deeper later on based on the outcome of the overall Self-Assessment.

A score of ‘1’ would mean that the answer is not clear at all, where a ‘5’ would mean the answer is crystal clear and defined. Leave emtpy when the question is not applicable or you don’t want to answer it, you can skip it without affecting your score. Write your score in the space provided.

After you have responded to all the appropriate statements in each section, compute your average score for that section, using the formula provided, and round to the nearest tenth. Then transfer to the corresponding spoke in the Research Computing Services Scorecard on the second next page of the Self-Assessment.

Your completed Research Computing Services Scorecard will give you a clear presentation of which Research Computing Services areas need attention.

Research Computing Services

Scorecard Example

Example of how the finalized Scorecard can look like:

Research Computing Services

Scorecard

Your Scores:

BEGINNING OF THE

SELF-ASSESSMENT:

Table of Contents

About The Art of Service6

Acknowledgments7

Included Resources - how to access7

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