How We Work

Initial enquiries for RSE collaborations can be made by contacting rse@sheffield.ac.uk.

We will get back to you and arrange a scoping meeting where a senior member of the RSE team will provide guidance on the RSE service and discuss the project. We will gather information at this meeting including:

• Planned start and end dates
• What skills and programming languages are needed
• How the project is being funded
• How much RSE time might be needed

If your project is within the RSE Team remit (have a look at What We Do), we will advise you on how to cost RSE time on the project. We will also assist with relevant parts of grant writing (such as justification of resources and software delivery plans).

RSE line management

Once an RSE has been allocated they will engage and collaborate with you and your team directly. Line management of the RSE will remain within the RSE Team.

A senior RSE will have already assisted you in scoping the project during the grant-writing stage. If you need more dedicated involvement of a senior RSE then consider making one our our senior RSEs a co-investigator in your grant. They will then be able to provide additional intellectual guidance for your project and any RSE staff members during the delivery stage.

If at any stage you need to change direction within your grant or are unhappy with the staff member then this should be raised with the senior RSE member who assisted you in grant preparation or in designing the work schedule.

Provision of RSE team members

Once your grant is funded we will review available staff and projects and allocate staffing to meet your needs, as best we can. Our pool of around 14 RSEs work on a total of around 40 projects each year, and managing this is a complex task. Funding applications are not always sucessful, which makes predicting staff availability difficult. We can normally provide RSE effort with the right skills exactly as planning in our scoping meeting, but sometimes we need to ask for compromise on start and end dates, or proportions of staff time allocated to a project. Our collaborators typically find this kind of request for flexibility less onerous than direct recruitment. If priorties shift during a project, we can potentially re-allocate staff with different skills.