Challenge

Solution

Conflicts occurred between researchers due to the complex and archaic process of negotiating on coding research papers to attain grants.

Existing data was collated in spreadsheets, and multiple databases. Manual coding on excel sheets was a costly and time-consuming process, resulting in user frustration.

Macquarie University approached Constant to facilitate a complete solution.

Constant collaborated with the stakeholders at Macquarie University and helped built the online software platform, “Radar”. Stakeholders interview and usability tests were carried out to inform on data visualisation and information architecture.

Acting as a single source of truth, the platform was developed to push all data to a data warehouse, build quality checks on it to make it compliant, and allow users to collaboratively edit data with escalations. Approval workflows were also taken into account to provide data governance for clean and valid data to be submitted.

The biggest value add of the product is an analytics platform that helps the university identify research areas to focus and invest in for better research outcomes.

Extensive modules were built to facilitate the solution:

• Research Outputs — for the purpose of viewing details of each research paper; allows users to add a new claim to attain grant

• Researchers — allows users to view detailed information relevant to researchers

• Bulk coding — users code research papers in bulk thus saving time and effort

• What Ifs — users create what if scenarios to test for the ideal research outcomes

• Portfolio — helps faculty administrators create portfolios and assign research papers to a portfolio and code it

• Data Quality — assists managers and administrators in managing data quality of all modules

The complete solution resulted in clean data for submission, reduction in staff count and hours spent in data preparation, The application enabled strategic value to code for investment areas for research. To date, the application is known to drive positive culture change amongst Macquarie University staff.