Justification. Of.
Resources. Surely three of the most hated words in academia, right up there
with ‘key performance indicators’ and ‘increased teaching load’. Such a dull
thing to write about, and what on earth to write anyway? Is it not utterly
obvious why you need an ELISA instrument and three litres of blocking-buffer
solution? Anyway, there’s so little time left before the deadline, and you
still haven’t finished editing the Case for support. And you’ve been working on
this grant pretty-much solidly for the last two months. I feel your pain.
And yet. Funders want to get maximum bang for their
research-funding buck, so value for money is often right up there with scientific
excellence and impact potential when it comes to assessing a proposal and
deciding whether or not to fund it. Indeed, it’s inextricably linked. In their
guidance for reviewers, for example, the Medical Research Council sets out just
three core assessment criteria – importance; scientific potential; and value
for money, on which they ask the following question:
Resources requested: are the funds requested essential for the work, and do the importance and scientific potential justify funding on the scale requested? Does the proposal represent good value for money?
To take another example, the peer-review template that BBSRC
reviewers are asked to complete includes the following question:
Value for money
Please comment on the value for money of the proposal.
Sure, some reviewers will only write a line or two here,
particularly if they generally like the look of the proposal overall. But
others will go into quite forensic detail, interrogating your budget almost on
a line-by-line basis and maybe questioning the need for some of the things in
it. Why risk exposing any vulnerabilities in your proposal, when just a little
bit of extra effort would allay such concerns and head off the possibility of
receiving potentially-damning criticism from reviewers?
Just to rewind slightly for a moment, I always emphasise the
fact that putting together a sound research proposal consists of two distinct
jobs: planning the project down to the last detail – the what, the when, the
how, the who; and writing about the project in a manner that will sell it to a
would-be funder. You should never try to do the second job before you’ve finished the first one.
As well as making sure you actually have something to write about, this ‘plan
it, then write about it’ approach has another clear advantage. When it comes to
working out your budget, you should know exactly
what you’re going to need in terms of resources (including people’s time,
equipment, consumables and so on). You’ll have a very clear idea of the items
of expenditure and the quantities involved, and of course you’ll have a sound
understanding of exactly why you need
them.
Justifying resources – the clue’s in the name…
As a bid writer I quite regularly see ‘Justification of
resources’ documents that are little more than lists. In effect, they just
replicate the budget – a list of items the applicant claims are needed, and their
cost. But they don’t explain why they’re
needed.
Imagine auditing the schedule of costs for your new-build
house. One of them is for ‘Dancing girls:
£10,000’. On the face of it, the first thing you’d do would be to fire the builder
and get in someone else who’s less intent on spending your cash on hedonistic frivolity.
But wait – it’s a high-end build, and the design brief calls for ornamental
statuary to decorate the courtyard. Had the builder only itemised this as ‘Life-size “dancing girl” stone statues for
external ornamentation (courtyard; one for each corner) x4 @ £2,500 each:
£10,000’ then you could have saved yourself the unnecessarily-raised blood
pressure and an angry telephone call. Sufficient information to explain and
justify costs puts suspicious minds at rest and pre-empts unnecessary queries.
How then to justify your costs properly and keep your
reviewers firmly on side?
Step 1: Don’t miss
anything out
The first step in convincing the wary reviewer that you
really do need everything you’re requesting in your budget is to make sure you
actually mention it in your justification. Once the budget’s finalised and
locked down, go through it line by line and list everything that needs
justifying. Some funders will tell you which costs do and don’t need to be
justified – UKRI, for example, provides cross-Council guidance on the Je-S website.
Some of the individual Research Councils also give guidance, for example this from EPSRC.
If there’s no specific guidance from the funder, then it’s wise to justify pretty
much everything, and definitely all directly-incurred costs (project-specific stuff
like travel, consumables, and postdocs who are dedicated to the project), any
equipment, and any directly-allocated costs (permanent-staff time, specialist
facilities charges, and perhaps pool technicians). Your list will form the basis
of your justification of resources, and because you based it on your finalised
budget you won’t miss anything out.
Step 2: Set out your
justification narrative clearly and intuitively
Reviewers know they have to look at your justification of resources
so they can comment on the ‘value for money’ criterion, but most of them will
enjoy doing so about as much as you enjoyed writing it. So make it easy for
them. Group items under clear and logical sub-headings, and set everything out
neatly and consistently. Use bold to enable them easily to pinpoint particular
items. This may not be storytelling but it’s still narrative, so write clearly
and completely and don’t lapse into barely-intelligible shorthand, text-speak
or similar. The basics of sound grammar continue to apply. Do be sure to check
and adhere to the funder’s procedural guidelines with regard to things like
document length, word-count limit and font. Which of course you always do!
Step 3: Explain clearly
why you need stuff
And so we get to the part that really seems to exercise
minds. Steps one and two only require a bit of organisation and attention to
detail, but this final step is the one that’s right up there with pulling teeth
for many of us. Yet the truth is that if you can’t justify something in your
budget convincingly to someone else then you simply don’t need it.
To return to my house-building analogy, consider the
following costs: bricks; slates; copper finials; Ferrari.
On the face of it, the first two barely need justifying.
Houses need walls and roofs, and bricks and slates are as good a material as
any for these purposes. But actually, as a scrupulous sort I’d want to check
that the quantities of these are appropriate,
and that I’m not shelling out for unnecessarily-expensive or otherwise-inappropriate
types of brick and slate. So I might prefer to see something like:
Standard house bricks (215mm x 65mm) to build 15m x 12m two-storey house @118 bricks per m2 of wall (double-leaf) with 5% overage allowance – 12,500 bricks
Spanish roof slates (600mm x 300mm) for 240m2 roof @13 slates per m2 (390mm overlap) with 10% overage allowance – 3,430 slates
If you’re a quantity surveyor or a builder then please don’t
examine my quantities here too carefully – no doubt they’re incorrect. But for
our purposes, the above is clear and intelligible. It gives the
sceptically-minded reader enough information to determine whether or not
whoever wrote it is having a laugh, or making it all up on the hoof. And it
does so in a way that’s understandable to the non-expert, without taking any
sort of condescending tone that might irritate an expert reviewer.
The third item on our list above needs a bit more
explanation. Copper what? But I commissioned
a fairly ornate roof, and so the following extra detail would reassure me that it’s
all legitimate:
Decorative copper roof finials (14 inch) for roof-ridge ends (x2) to ornament roof as specified
And what about the last item on the list? Well, no amount of
explanation is likely to convince me that my house build requires the purchase
of a Ferrari. It’s unjustifiable and so shouldn’t be in the budget. As such, it’s
going to cause me to question whether I’ve picked the right builder to give my
money to.
How all this
translates to a research proposal
The safest approach is never to assume. Something that may
seem so obvious to you as to need no explanation may not be at all clear to
someone else, perhaps a reviewer from outside your immediate area of scientific
specialism. Make clear why the item – and the quantity stated – is necessary
for the project to go ahead as described in the proposal.
I won’t reproduce the UKRI guidance, but in short keep
in mind that you’re answering the question why here. Why have you chosen that
international conference? Why do four
of you need to attend? Why will the
project require 20% of your time (in other words, what specifically will you be
doing in the project that would take that amount of time)? What particular skills, expertise and capacity will your co-investigators
bring to the project, and how will they be deployed? Why do you need a postdoc for the whole of the project’s duration,
and why do you need to recruit at
that particular pay grade? Why will
they need that high-end laptop? Why
do you need those lab consumables – what specifically are they for and why is that necessary for the project?
The other key thing is to give a proper breakdown where appropriate.
The sub-headings ‘Travel’ and ‘Lab consumables’ tell me very little on their
own, for example, so simply giving a total figure for each of these isn’t going
to be at all helpful to the critical reviewer. For travel, I’d want to know who’s
travelling, where, how and for how long, so that I can judge whether the ‘why’
in the explanation seems reasonable and proportionate. Similarly, when it comes
to lab consumables I’d want to know what exactly that sub-heading means – what specifically
are they, how many of them are needed and how will they be used. Once again,
this would enable me to judge whether the explanation of why they’re needed
seems appropriate.
Some examples
Here are some examples, provided by the Natural Environment Research
Council, of how to justify key items in a research-project budget:
Investigator effort: The PI will spend an average of 2.5 hours per week throughout the 36 months which will cover grant administration, guiding the PDRA in fluid inclusion analysis, and co-ordinating the research team. The Co-I effort varies: Co-I One will spend an average of 5 hours per week guiding the PDRA in microtextural techniques and data analysis, and contributing to project meetings. Co-I Two will spend an average of 7.5 hours per week training and guiding the PDRA in Ar/Ar dating, which encompasses sample preparation, the use of the laserprobe and noble gas mass spectrometry, data collection, data quality assessment, data reduction and presentation. Ar/Ar data interpretation is critically dependent on the measured sub-grains (from microtextural analysis) and microthermometry (from fluid inclusion analysis) and will involve modelling of the measured Ar/Ar data with respect to grain sizes and temperatures under the guidance of Co-I Two.
Conference attendance: We seek funding for conference attendance for the PDRA and investigators. This is essential for the international dissemination of results and to provide networking and career development opportunities for the PDRA. We have chosen AGU (San Francisco 2008) and Geofluids (Adelaide 2009), both of which will attract wide international audiences both in the specific fields of the proposal and more broadly.
Source: NERC; see the
whole example Justification of resources here
So to finish
Be aware that it can be as important to request sufficient resources, appropriate to
your proposed approach and methodology, as it is to avoid requesting too much. An expert reviewer with
relevant scientific experience will spot a project that’s under-resourced and
will rightly be concerned that you’ll be unable to deliver.
A final point. We all know that, for various good reasons,
putting together a research proposal is often a rush job. A good reviewer
though will be looking out for projects that have been meticulously planned
down to the last detail, leaving no stone un-turned. These tend to make for the
best-written, clearest proposals, and a well-thought-through budget and accompanying
justification are definitely hallmarks of a carefully-planned research project.
By showing the reviewer that you’re on the case and have given due attention to
detail you’ll be increasing your chances of success. Conversely, in a
highly-competitive funding environment a poor justification of resources can be
enough to kill an otherwise-decent proposal. So never let it be the ha’p’orth
of tar for want of which the ship ends up being spoiled.The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog.
