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strategy.qmd
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---
title: "Strategy"
description: Strategic principles and actions taken in Work Package 1.
---
We've structured and organised Work Package 1 based on the increasing
need for openness, transparency, and reproducibility in research. Work
Package 1 will deliver the day-to-day project and operations management
of all the work packages, as well as facilitating the close
collaboration and joint development of expertise across all seven Steno
Centers.
To achieve effective and optimal coordination and management of a
complex project like this, we will employ resources and tools developed
and tested at the Steno Diabetes Center Aarhus in the past years
[@Johnston2022; @DARTER; @ukbaid; @seedcase; @sdca-github] to offer a
practical framework for sharing knowledge and technical skills across
centres, which will deliver "better research done in less time"
[@Lowndes2017] while following reproducible and open scientific
practices.
## Guiding principles
One of the initial steps in the strategy involves developing and
implementing general principles that will guide collaboration and work
across the Steno Centers. This ensures we have a basis for following a
common approach to working and communicating together when managing the
work packages. While we will finalise and refine the principles during
the first year of the project, below are some principles that will form
the basis for all other principles.
- Assume openness with as many things as possible, including
communication.
- Implement openness as much as possible, excluding personal and
sensitive data.
- Disseminate as many steps of the research lifecycle as possible,
including non-traditional outputs (e.g. protocols or standard
operating procedures).
- Implement as much as possible explicit analyses and data
processing/management using code-based and programmatic
pipeline/workflow management.
## Specifics of the strategy
Expanding on the strategies listed on the [landing page](index.qmd), the
below describes more of the details about the specific strategies from a
technical or digital perspective. Specific activities and tasks are
shown below in @fig-activities. Many of these activities and strategies
will get support and contributions from the [Seedcase
Project](https://seedcase-project.org/) team at Steno Aarhus, who
regularly use and refine many of these practices in their work.
{#fig-activities}
### Project management
While general project management and coordination will be done by the
management [group](groups.qmd), the technical strategy for the project
management will involve applying iterative and incremental methods often
used in software development, such as Agile-inspired methods.
Practically, this involves:
- Using time-bound "iterations" that has a specific aim to complete,
where tasks are assigned that work toward completing this aim. This
may involve having iterations be on a monthly basis.
- Using a (digital) project board to track tasks, their status, who is
assigned to what, with issues or discussions connected to each task.
- Having regular "reflection" meetings to identify things that work
and things to improve on in our collaboration and management.
### Collaborative practices
Building an effective collaboration between groups, centers, and people
requires agreeing to a set of common practices that we all adhere to. In
this way, we'll develop a description of basic standards and practices
that we will discuss, refine, and agree on during the first year of the
project. These documents will be living documents that we will post
publicly on this website. Concretely, some practices may be:
- Using a common set of tools for communication that works for
everyone.
- Using relevant communication channels dependent on the purpose, for
example, extended discussions of a specific task should be done
where the task is listed.
### Research operations
The aim of research operations is to optimise day-to-day work in order
to minimise time and effort spent per unit of output. This often
integrates software engineering and data engineering work to accomplish
the operational task. Concretely, this may include:
- Automatically converting our documentation in easy to share and
search websites.
- Regularly and actively seeking out areas of the research lifecycle
that can be simplified, streamlined, or automated by incorporating
dedicated meetings or reviews to uncover these areas to optimise.
Then, based on this information, working to implement a solution.
- Identifying and documenting the resources, limitations, and barriers
on cross-Steno collaboration practices and processes to minimize
their impact on the project.
### Software development
Research output includes more than just papers and presentations. It
also includes analytic methods implemented as software packages. When
work packages, such as Work Package 2, build or work on an analytic
method, we will ensure that work with them to develop the software in a
robust, well-designed, reliable, and maintainable way. Concretely, some
activities may include:
- Developing a template for building the software package that
includes best practices for software development.
### Data engineering
Data engineering is the practice of designing, structuring, and building
data infrastructures and pipelines that support the collection and
storage of high-quality data. Part of the aim of the Seedcase Project is
in building software tools to help with creating and managing data and
metadata in a way that applies FAIR principles and that simplifies the
tasks that researchers have with requesting and working with the data.
So the Seedcase team will be heavily involved in these tasks.
### Technical working group
To help facilitate the technical and digital strategies so that they are
achievable, we will establish a technical working group. More details
about this group is found in the [Groups](groups.qmd) page.
### Training
A major component of Work Package 1 is in training and upskilling
activities. We will accomplish these by collaborating with the
NNF-funded software and training-based Seedcase Project [@seedcase] as
well as with the expertise we've developed at Steno Aarhus over the
years. Training will include both formal and informal activities that
focus on skills not often taught to researchers, such as data
engineering, modern collaborative practices, and iterative project
management methods.
## References