User Group Changes for Kuali Research

Dear Kuali Research Community:

Thanks very much to the many of you who shared feedback both on what you value about our user groups and what could be improved. User groups are a critical part of the Kuali Research Community, and we’re committed to maintaining them and ensuring that they continue to evolve to help both our customers and our company use technology to solve problems in research administration and compliance. Whether you’re a regular attendee at our user groups or have never before joined, read on to learn about the changes we’re proposing to make our user groups and our overall communication with you more effective.

As you may know, in November and December we paused our regular cadence of user group meetings to reflect on how we could make the groups more effective and encourage broader participation across our community. Here are some of the key themes we heard from community member schools during this time period:

• Hearing how other schools are using the products is one of the most valuable things about user groups.
• Information about what modules each school is using would be really helpful and would facilitate conversations outside of the user groups.
• Agenda questions and topics should be communicated well in advance of the user group meetings so folks can plan attendance or consult on the topic with others at their institution before the meeting.
• Community members want to hear about features before they are released, not after.
• Kuali updates on delivered features and bug fixes shouldn’t take up agenda time during the user group meetings, but folks should have the opportunity to ask questions in user groups.
• There should be better coordination across user groups (and between the SP and Compliance parts of the suite) so that areas of the suite that support related processes can be better integrated and more consistent.
• The community forums should still be the primary place to share feedback, but Kuali needs to monitor and respond more consistently.
• There should be more transparency about why Kuali does or does not incorporate feedback given from user groups.

We’re proposing the following changes to our user group structure and communication. We welcome your feedback as we monitor whether these changes succeed in encouraging broader participation across our community.

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General and New Feature Communication

New feature releases. We will continue to maintain our release notes. In addition, all new features will be announced to our community via an email announcement, which will include (or link to) a detailed description of the feature, often in the form of a brief video.

Monthly Newsletter. Starting in the first quarter of this year, we will begin publishing a monthly newsletter that includes a summary of all new features released in the month, announcements about new schools joining our community or going live with new modules of the software, and highlights about upcoming user group agenda topics. Community members are welcome to submit ideas and topics for newsletter consideration, as well as articles and announcements.

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User Groups

User group cadence. To ensure that user group agendas get adequate planning and preparation and allow time for in-depth discussion, we’ll be changing the user group cadence from monthly to quarterly, and extending the length to 90 minutes.

Accessing Meetings. The meeting schedule, along with links and information to join the meetings, is available here. You will need an account on our Kuali Research Community Forum to access the information. If you need to request an account, information on how to do that is available here. Meetings will be recorded and posted to our Community Forum for those who aren’t able to attend.

Module User groups. We’ll move forward with the following user groups:

• Pre-Award. This group will focus on our Proposal Development, Institutional Proposal and Negotiations modules, including S2S and Budget, as well as associated reporting functions. The group will be facilitated by Marissa Pio Roda and Dennis Kapoyos, Kuali Research Product Managers.
• Post-Award. This group will focus on our Award, SubAward, and Export Control modules, as well as associated reporting functions. This group will be facilitated by Marissa Pio Roda.
• COI/COC. This group will focus on our Conflict of Interest/Conflict of Commitment module, as well as associated reporting functions. This group will be facilitated by Hamza Asif, Kuali Research Product Manager.
• Protocols. This group will focus on our IRB, IACUC, and soon-to-be-released IBC modules. The group will be facilitated by Hamza Asif.

Hosted User group. Our hosted user group was created at a time when SaaS customers were only a small part of the Kuali Research community. Now that 90% of our customer schools are SaaS customers, the Hosted user group functions primarily as a summary of discussions taking place at the other user groups. We’re going to discontinue that group and encourage folks to engage deeply in the module-specific user groups.

Our Technical/On Prem User group will continue with the planned transition to open office hours with our engineers, and it will continue to occur monthly.

User group agendas and planning.

• User group agendas will be sent out two weeks prior to the meeting, and key topics or questions will also be featured in the monthly newsletter.
• Agendas will typically be focused on:
  • Review of roadmap in “now/next/after” format, along with context for why the features have been selected for development.
  • Discussion/feedback on the design of features Kuali is building within the next 2 quarters.Review of feature feedback in Community forums.
  • Discussion of business challenges facing our community that could be solved through software for future planning.
  • Discussion of items emerging from FDP or other professional organizations.
  • Discussion/questions about how community member schools are using the software.
  • Q&A about recently released features.
  • Other agenda topics or questions contributed from community schools.

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Community Mentor Program

In 2021, we will introduce a community mentor program, pairing new community member schools with a contact from a peer school who can help them integrate into the community, answer questions, and be a general resource for help and guidance. If you’re interested in serving as a community mentor, please contact Kat Szulc ([e-mail]).

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Measuring Success

We’re eager for your feedback on whether these changes make the user groups more helpful to you. Here are the specific goals we’re targeting this year to measure the success of these changes:

• Double the number of community member schools participating in user groups in 2021.
• Ensure that our community members feel that user groups are a meaningful and helpful part of their professional lives, based on the results of a semi-annual survey.

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Please feel free to reach out to me directly with thoughts or feedback about these changes. If you’ve never joined a user group meeting before, we hope you’ll take this opportunity to engage in these important community conversations. Information about how to get involved in our user groups is available here.

Warm regards,

Kaci Foster
General Manager, Kuali Research