Consulting

This is a Draft. Expect changes.

Introduction

UFRC Consulting service allows a research group to pre-purchase a number of RC staff hours and use RC staff expertise to, for example,

• Facilitate or accelerate a group project
• Get priority help in solving an issue
• Get support for issues that are out of scope of the RC support included with your investment into RC resources. The complexity of the support issues that would be crossing the consulting threshold is such that each issue needs to be considered individually, so it’s extremely difficult to define a limit. As an example, support effort of any type beyond 1-4 hours of staff time may qualify as consulting.

The availability of RC staff is limited, so RC Consultants cannot realistically be the main or even major contributors to most projects. The goal is to remove bottlenecks, facilitate and accelerate work by utilizing specific expertise from RC staff. As of 2022 it would be reasonable to expect from one to four hours of consulting time per RC staff member per week. In addition, consulting projects cannot be open-ended. Each engagement should last at most a few weeks to avoid having a small number of research groups monopolize limited RC consulting staff effort. We’ll be happy to expand these limits if staff availability increases.

Purchasing Consulting Hours

To start the consulting process it may be helpful to make an initial contact to discuss the potential consulting engagement. See Get Help for our support contact options.

Consulting hours need to be pre-purchased using the appropriate purchase form.

Initiating Consulting Effort

Since our staff members have a variety of expertise please open a ticket in our Support System to start a conversation. A project ticket category can be used.

The ticket will allow us to determine who would be the initial person to communicate with your group as we'd like to make sure you get help from a person or people with the right expertise.

For face-to-face interactions, once consulting effort is commenced, organizational calendars or any RC Remote Support method can be used for discussions or meeting scheduling.

Progress Reporting

RC Staff will maintain an accessible document (e.g. a spreadsheet) listing the total and remaining consulting hours and reporting used hours and activities.

A periodic review of the progress towards the originally agreed upon deliverables can and should be scheduled by the research group.