Research Glossary
| Abstract | The project summary or abstract is a concise and objective summary of your proposed research. The abstract of a study protocol or proposal should follow the logical flow of main points in a study proposal and outline the logic of the expanded work. |
| Allowable Cost | An Allowable Cost is reasonable, necessary, allocable, consistently treated, and not prohibited. These rules constitute best practices for all grant funding, but they are applied with special strictness to federal funds. Allowability is determined when the budget is created and also when costs are actually charged to the project. |
| Bottom-Up Estimating | Bottom-Up Estimating is a process of estimating individual schedule activities or costs and then aggregating these together to come up with a total estimate for the work package. Every schedule activity is estimated individually and all individual estimates are added together, to come up with a total. The accuracy of these estimates is proportional to the accuracy of the estimates at the schedule activity level, which in turn depend on the size, complexity, and detailed understanding of the schedule activity. |
| Budget | The Budget is the approved estimate for a project or a work breakdown structure component or any schedule activity. |
| Change Management Plan | Change Management Plan documents change requests as a formal proposal or recommendation to change project related documents, deliverables, or baseline. Change requests should follow the change management process and generally approved by the change management board before implementation. |
| Communications Management Plan | Communications Management Plan documents the different types of stakeholder information needs, the frequency and format of the information distribution, and the method of communication along with the people/teams responsible for the communication. |
| Consultant | A Consultant is a stakeholder in your project who provides expert advice professionally. |
| Contractor | A Contractor is a key stakeholder who is vital to your project that undertakes a contract to provide materials or labor to perform a service or do a job related to your research project. |
| Core Facilities | Core facilities are centralized shared research resources that provide access to instruments, technologies, services, as well as expert consultation and other services to scientific and clinical investigators. |
| Cost Baseline | A Cost Baseline is an approved time phased plan that is created once a detailed budget is developed and approved, the project manager should publish this baseline and set it as a point of comparison for actual performance progress. |
| Cost Management Plan | Cost Management Plan describes how costs will be managed, controlled and details the management and approval procedure for changes to the cost baseline. |
| Deliverable | A Deliverable is a thing able to be provided, especially as a product of a development process. |
| Dissemination | Dissemination is the act of spreading something, especially information, widely; circulation. |
| Equipment | Equipment is any durable item of tangible nonexpendable personal property having a useful life of more than one year that costs over $5,000 or more per unit. |
| Evaluation Design | The Evaluation Design is the logical model or conceptual framework used to arrive at conclusions about outcomes. |
| Fringe Benefits | Fringe Benefits are additional costs associated with an employee’s salary such as medical insurance and retirement plans. Fringe benefits should be requested with each salary at the current Children’s Mercy rate of 21.25%. These costs are calculated based on the institution’s own policy. As referenced above, there is no cap on the fringe benefits rate. |
| Funding Agency | A Funding Agency is an organization that provides research funding in the form of research grants or scholarships. These include arts councils and research councils for the funding of science. |
| Gantt Chart | A Gantt Chart is a visual representation of a project schedule as a chart in which a series of horizontal lines shows the amount of work done or production completed in certain periods of time in relation to the amount planned for those periods. |
| Human Resources Plan | Human Resources Plan identifies and documents the required skills, roles and responsibilities of project teams or groups for the various project activities and their reporting relationships. |
| Hypothesis | A Hypothesis is a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation. |
| Indirect Costs | Indirect Costs represent the expenses of doing research that are not readily identified with a specific activity but are necessary to the general operation of the project. Indirect costs are anything that is not a direct cost, such as: heat, light, or accounting. In general, indirect costs are calculated as a percentage to determine the proportion of departmental organizational costs each project should bear. |
| Informed Consent | Informed Consent is a person’s voluntary agreement, based upon adequate knowledge and understanding, to participate in human subjects research or undergo a medical procedure. In giving informed consent, people may not waive legal rights or release or appear to release an investigator or sponsor from liability for negligence. |
| Letter of Intent | A Letter of Intent (LOI) is a document that expresses your organization’s intention of applying for a grant. In some cases, only accepted LOIs will be allowed to submit full application proposals. |
| NIH Grant Specialist | An NIH Grant Specialist is responsible for managing and coordinating a complex grants portfolio including inter-agency agreements, Cooperative Agreements, and highly technical special projects. They serve as experts for the planning, implementation and evaluation of grant proposals and provide guidance on cooperative agreements, cost-share agreements, participating agreements, collection agreements, interagency and intra-agency agreements and memoranda of understanding. |
| Patient Care | Patient Care is any cost that is above standard of care or that the sponsor is willing to pay for. |
| PMCD | PMID: PubMed ID: All PubMed records are assigned this unique number when they are added to PubMed. Not all PubMed records have the PMCID attached to the record. |
| PMCID | PMCID: PubMed Central ID: Not same as the PMID. All references in PubMed Central have the PMCID. |
| Portfolio | A Portfolio refers to projects, programs, sub-portfolios, and operations managed as a group to achieve strategic objectives. This is all of the programs and project supporting the organizational strategies are prioritized and organized. |
| Potential Risk Sources | Potential Risk Sources to your project could include human risks, operational risks, reputational risks, procedural risks, project-specific risks financial risks, technical risks, natural risks, political risks, and structural risks. |
| Procurement Management Plan | Procurement Management Plan describes the procurement process throughout the project procurement life cycle that includes identifying the procurement needs, types of procurement documents to solicit bids from sellers and seller’s responses, authority, roles and responsibilities of the project procurement team, acceptance criteria, and contract closure. |
| Program | A Program is a group of related projects, subprograms and program activities managed in a coordinated way to obtain benefits not available from management them individually. A program manages project interdependencies and harmonizes collective project capabilities. |
| Program Officer | The Program Officer is the official responsible for the programmatic, scientific, and/or technical aspects of a grant. |
| Programmatic Travel | Programmatic Travel is generally any travel that is needed for the conduct of the project (i.e., focus groups, consultants, and others). |
| Progressive Elaboration | Progressive Elaboration is a project management technique where the project plan is being continuously and constantly modified, detailed, and improved as newer and more improved (as well as more highly detailed), sets of information becomes available. In this way, the project unfolds with a series of successive iterations. Progressive elaboration is a fundamentally important step to the project management planning process as it can take a sketchy preliminary plan and refine it. |
| Project | A Project is a temporary endeavor with a start and a finish when all project objectives have been met. It creates a unique product, service or result transition and follows organizational procedures. A project can create a Product, Service, Improvement in an existing product or service, or a Result, such as an outcome or document. A Project has a specific scope and may have a program with portfolio objectives. |
| Project Charter | The Project Charter document will concisely explain the project purpose or justification, requirements, objectives, constraints, budget and stakeholders. The Project Charter document will be the starting point of your project and will form the foundation for the rest of your project. |
| Project Governance | Project Governance is an oversight function that is aligned with the organization’s governance model that encompasses the project life cycle. |
| Project Life Cycle | A Project Life Cycle is the series of phases that a project passes through from its initiation to its closure. |
| Project Management Plan | The Project Management Plan is the document that the project manager builds to describe in more details the planning of the project and its organization. The plan Project Management Plan consists of the cost baseline, project schedule, and the scope statement, in addition to various management plans, and the human resource plan. Once completed and approved, all activities are completed under the project management plan. As a living document, it is updated to reflect the current project status and should reflect a reasonable and realistic forecast of project completion. |
| Project Stakeholder | A Project Stakeholder is an individual, group, or organization who may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity or outcome of a project. Project Stakeholders includes all project team members, all internal and external interested parties, active and passive people, all members of the project team, all interested entities, sponsors, customers and users, sellers, business partners, organizational groups, functional managers, and other stakeholders. |
| Quality Assurance | Quality Assurance is a process concerned with identifying the right quality processes needed to achieve the project objectives and performing regular quality audits to ensure the processes are followed effectively. |
| Quality Management | Quality Management is concerned with managing the quality related aspects of the project. It is the identification of quality requirements and standards for the project and its deliverables, and the documentation of how the project demonstrates compliance with relevant quality requirements. Consider customer satisfaction, prevention over inspection, continuous improvements, management responsibility, and cost of quality (COQ) what it costs to maintain quality or recover from defects. |
| Request for Proposal/Applications | A Request for Proposal/Applications or application is a formal statement that solicits grant or cooperative agreement applications in a well-defined scientific area to accomplish specific program objectives. An RFA indicates the estimated amount of funds set aside for the competition, the estimated number of awards to be made, whether cost sharing is required, and the application submission date(s). For cooperative agreements, the RFA will describe the responsibilities and obligations of NIH and awardees as well as joint responsibilities and obligations. Applications submitted in response to an RFA are usually reviewed by a Scientific Review Group (SRG) specially convened by the awarding component that issued the RFA. |
| Research Requirements Management Plan | Research Requirements Management Plan describes how requirements will be prioritized, managed, controlled and details the management and approval procedure for changes to the scope baseline. |
| Research Misconduct | Research Misconduct is the fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reporting research, or in reporting research results. Fabrication is making up data or results and recording or reporting them. Falsification is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that research is not accurately represented in the research record. Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. Research misconduct does not include honest error or honest differences of opinion. |
| Responsible Party | Responsible Party is the term used in Title VIII of the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act (FDAAA) of 2007 (P.L. 110-85) to refer to the entity or individual who is responsible for registering a clinical investigation and submitting clinical trial information to the Clinical Trial Registry Data Bank. Responsible party is defined by the law as the sponsor of the clinical trial or the PD/PI of such clinical trial if so designated by a sponsor, contractor, grantee, or awardee, so long as the PD/PI is responsible for conducting the trial and has sufficient data rights. |
| Scientific Review Officer | A Scientific Review Officer (SRO) is the NIH official who serves as the designated Federal official having legal responsibility for managing the peer review meeting, the procedures for evaluating the applications assigned to the Scientific Review Group and the determinations and management of conflicts of interest, as noted in 42 CFR 52(h). |
| Scientific Travel | Scientific Travel is generally any travel that is related to presenting research findings at conferences, symposiums, and so forth. |
| Scope Baseline | A Scope Baseline is the approved project scope and used during scope change management to determine and prevent scope creep. The scope baseline is primarily comprised of the project scope statement, work breakdown structure and work breakdown structure dictionary. |
| Scope Management | Scope Management is all about ensuring that the project includes all the work required, and only the work required in order to complete the project successfully. (With attention to what is NOT included in the project.) |
| Specific Aims | Specific Aims are a component of an application’s Research Plan which describes concisely the goals of the proposed research and summarizes the expected outcome(s), including the impact that the results of the proposed research will exert on the research field(s) involved. Includes the specific objectives of the research proposed (e.g., to test a stated hypothesis, create a novel design, solve a specific problem, challenge an existing paradigm or clinical practice, address a critical barrier to progress in the field, or develop new technology). |
| Stakeholder Risk | You may have Project Risk with Key Stakeholders and should consider their: Risk Appetite, the degree of uncertainty that a stakeholder is willing to take in hope of the reward, Risk Tolerance, the degree of risk that a person or an entity can withstand, and Risk Threshold, the point where an entity will either accept or no longer tolerate the risk. |
| Statistical Analysis | Statistical Analysis is a component of data analytics. It refers to a collection of methods used to process large amounts of data and report overall trends. Statistical analysis is particularly useful when dealing with noisy data. Statistical analysis provides ways to objectively report on how unusual an event is based on historical data. |
| Study Design And Methods | Study Design And Methods is a systematic plan to study a scientific problem. The design of a study defines the study type (descriptive, correlation, semi-experimental, experimental, review, meta-analytic) and sub-type (e.g., descriptive-longitudinal case study), research question, hypotheses, independent and dependent variables, experimental design, and, if applicable, data collection methods and a statistical analysis plan. Research design is the framework that has been created to seek answers to research questions. |
| Subcontract | A Subcontract is a contract for a collaborating company or individual to do work for or with the Children’s Mercy Hospital as part of a larger research project. |
| Supplies | Supplies are consumable items used in the course of research (i.e., syringes, pipettes, primers, assays). |
| Work Breakdown Structure | The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a hierarchical decomposition of work to be performed by the project team to meet the project objectives. It structures and defines the project scope. |
| Work Breakdown Structure Dictionary | Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) Dictionary is a companion to Work Breakdown Structure that gives the “how will we build this” piece. |
| Workplan | The Workplan is a document that is used to organize a project. It outlines the plan by which the individual plans to complete a quality project within a given amount of time and in compliance with a set budget. |
