Consortium Meeting - An amazing 2 days

What an amazing 2 days it has been.

I was invited to be part of the consortium workshop to work on a £2m grant research project on 'service and support' funded half by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of UK and half by BAE Systems. 60 submissions of interests went in and 16 were chosen and we all turned up at Hilton Metropole London for the 2 day workshop (BAE paid for hotel, meals etc. and EPSRC kept us fed and watered throughout). Out of the 16 scientists, 4 were from Cambridge, 4 from Cranfield. The rest of us were spread out - bath, nottingham, brighton, loughborough, leeds and of course me from exeter. All were either mechanical or systems engineers or in operations (except me who's the business economist/service). 3 women.

BAE briefed us twice over the day to explain what the research focus was i.e. Issues in transforming BAEsystems into a service company with high capability to deliver service and support to their customers, the biggest 2 customers are the Ministry of Defence and the US dept of defence but of course, they also have commercial clients. Until now, I thought the typhoon and tornado were weather systems. How was I to know that they are aircrafts? I learnt about the service BAE provide in battle - 'surge' (which means increase intensity of one particular type of land/sea or air vehicle) and 'swing' (a wide range of battle vehicles - helicopters, tanks, aircraft etc.) and all the defence acronyms SC21, DIS, ATTAC,....groan....

On to the real battle.

It started off mild enough. We had to get ourselves into groups of 3 and draw 3 venn diagrams on a flipchart. Write what you do, where the overlaps are and after 5 mins, put it up on the wall. The wall was the wall of 'skills' and 'capabilities' and everyone then spent 20mins examining the wall (they call it marketplace) so that you can see who and where your skills can be matched with i.e. You shop for research partners that integrate with your work to see if you could get a project together.

Then we had world cafe 1. A table with a big table paper where we write down what issues there are important in service and support provision for BAe Systems that needs research in. But you had to link all the issues together on the big table map. After 20 mins, music sounds and you go through the process again at another table but one stays behind to brief the others coming into the table. There were 3 questions to answer in rotation. After it was over, we all were asked to think of 3 over-arching issues that you felt was important and write them down on the 3 post-its. Then we all stood at a blank wall and paste our 3 issues on the wall, closest to where others may have issues that are similar. 'Clusters' of issues start to merge.....

After lunch we were asked to form groups that discussed research questions. Same 'speed-dating' kind of process again. By the end of the day, we did the 3 post-its again and this time the clusters were research questions. We then left the room and the BAE and EPSRC people ranked the questions.

When we came back, we saw the rankings and had to decide if u wanted to 'champion' one of the research questions and then would try to get people to 'buy-in' to the project to answer that question. It was clear that there were 6 projects by then. My name was on 2 of them (I was being strategic) and we spent time scoping out what the 2 projects were about. BAE and EPSRC panel were hovering around us and we sought their advice on what was relevant to the firm, research directions etc.

Next morning, every one of the 6 projects were presented in terms of the research questions, objectives, skills etc. Questions were asked and we had to defend it. Then we were all told that you're given another 20mins to see if you could merge projects and to cost out the resources. It started to become obvious that integration was key to getting your project adopted so 5 of us merged the 2 groups I had my name on and costed both our project in an integrated project. Looking around the room, we noticed that after consolidation, another 2 groups have merged and there were only 4 groups left (so we mentally calculated that we had to do it within £500,000) so we sat down and tried to make the budget work. My share would be a research fellow for 1 year and 10% of my time so around £100,000.

We then had to present the project. The first group (A) presented what they were going to do and said their costs were £1.1m (the cheek! They're trying to kick one of us out!). Second group presented and costs were £450,000. we presented and then the last group presented. Both our costs were at £500,000 each.

Then we had to vote. We can't vote for our own group but we had to rank the other 3 or if we wanted to vote a group out. We, as a group, voted group A 'out' because of a lack of fit and their unwillingness to yield on the budget.

The votes of ours and BAe staff came in. Group A - 9. Group B- 21, us- 20. D - 19.
The attack on group A by the panel was scathing. They were literally told to either fit it into half million or split their project into 2 and compete between themselves. I think the group ousted 2 members (1 woman) and came in with a reduced project scope and costs. The atmosphere was really tense and you could see group A academics reacting in many ways - getting angry, defensive, etc.

The 3 of our work groups are now through to the last stage where we need to work with Cambridge (Duncan) who is the chair of the consortium to come up with one consolidated research proposal for the £2m by 6 sep 07. The proposal goes to reviewers and results will be known mid Nov. I''ve cleared two hurdles now so I hope for the best.

It was a weird experience to be sure. I realised that the panel has already chosen us for our skills but the exercise was to see if we could, or be willing to, work together. It really forced us to be integrate all our skills for a viable project. In a sense, even if you are the best in your field, it makes no difference if you can't work together so they really drove us through the whole process and see who will come out of it flexible enough to be included.

But the power play was scary. You could see people shoving their own agenda into the group even if it didn't fit, cutting out others. There was one guy who completely ignored what I said and just talked like I wasn't even there. I was close to getting really angry. You had to be vocal and firm..make your case on where your methods and your skills fit and not back down. Yet you had to have allies, find people that you could work with. 16 academics - with 9 professors. The dynamics of the interaction was aggressive and the atmosphere highly charged and I often felt I was part of a sociological experiment. Think survivor.

At the end of the day as I left the room, I said my goodbyes to Paul Tasker, the BAeSystem person heading up the whole project. The guy in front of me said his goodbyes first and Paul just nodded and said thanks for coming. When it came to me, he said that he was very happy I stuck it to the end and that I was going to be in the project because he felt that the project really needed my skill set (remember, the entire BAE and EPSRC panel knew all our skills well from our expressions of interest). I was surprised and rather relieved because for the whole 2 days, I had great difficulty trying to get some of them into thinking 'service' rather than 'defence support' or 'maintenance' and I felt I was fighting a losing war. I was the only business economist/marketing/service person in there and there was no other person with my commercial and customer focused research experience. That meant it was hard to find allies. it was quite daunting and my confidence was starting to erode.

oh well, I survived to tell the tale. My group's project is 'Capability analysis for contract design through costs, benefit and risk assessment'. 5 of us from Cranfield, Exeter, Belfast, Bath and Salfrod. I do discourse analysis to analyse risks, conjoint analysis for benefits and marginal analysis for cost/benefit tradeoffs. It was what I set out in my original document that I wanted to do so i'm happy and being able to get first hand data fr BAE would be very very useful for publications. Being part of the consortium is of course great CV building and really a good way to build on my 'aerospace' and 'service science' experience.

It was one of the most interesting 2 days I've ever experienced. And it was a brilliant process. How do you get 16 people to shake out the top 4 most important research questions on service and support that they are willing to work together on and how do you make sure that they do that in the leanest and most efficient way? The process, starting from issues to challenges to research questions literally distil out, not the most important questions, but the best questions the academics were willing to work together on. And how do you get them to do it for the least amount of money? You make them compete amongst themselves. We were willing to cut our own time costs down to the bare minimum to be in the consortium. In the end, BAEsystems got 4 important research questions and 14 academics input into the questions for free (2 who could not conform were 'ousted' from the group). And they only need to pay £1m (EPSRC pays the other £1m) to get the answers. If it was any other call, each research project would have costed £800,000 at least. And to top it all, the academics who 'got in' were actually happy to be included. BAESystems definitely came out the winner. I can't help but feel a little peeved. I guess I feel rather manipulated but I suppose that's the nature of the game.