Distributed Team Working - Approaches for DiSSCo

Abstract

As a highly decentralised research infrastructure, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) will need to develop cross-institutional teams, adopting work practices where individual staff are intensively working collectively on common tasks in a distributed environment. These flexible and distributed working practices will be essential to the delivery of the research infrastructure across a wide range of delivery partners and a geographically dispersed set of scarce resources and skills, particularly in more technical roles. Since work to consider secondment and distributed working in DiSSCo was first envisaged, there has been a step change in distributed working owing to the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns or other restrictions to where work could take place. This report examines distributed team working practices and how they have changed, through interviews with a range of key roles across DiSSCo Prepare institutions. It briefly examines key project management and technical team delivery techniques. It documents how some of these approaches have been piloted within DiSSCo Prepare for the development, testing and delivery of DiSSCo Policy and Digital Maturity tools. Finally, bringing this together with previous work on secondment policies and practices for DiSSCo, we make recommendations about how secondment and distributed team working can be approached to enhance DiSSCo capabilities and the likelihood of successful implementation of the research infrastructure.