Consulting

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 project.
• Get priority help with software, hardware, coding, or architecture.
• Get support for issues that are out of scope of the RC support included with your investment in RC resources. Complex support requests may require consulting, each issue needs to be considered individually, so it’s difficult to define a limit. As an example, support effort beyond 5 hours of staff time may qualify as consulting.

The availability of RC staff is limited, so RC Consultants may not be available as the main contributors to projects. See the Research Software Engineering for an option of hiring professional Research Software Engineers who can become a part of your team for the duration of a software development project. The goal of RC Consulting is to remove bottlenecks, facilitate and accelerate work by utilizing specific expertise from RC staff. It is reasonable to expect up to four hours of consulting time per RC staff member per week, longer for AI consulting.

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 the staff availability increases.

Initiating Consulting Effort

Since our staff members have a variety of expertise please open a ticket in our Support System to start a conversation. The project ticket category should be used. The ticket will allow us to determine the the right expert to communicate with your group.

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

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.

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.