Because good research needs good data

Introducing processes to help us scale

Patricia Herterich | 19 November 2020

When I took over DMPonline product management in July, it seemed like a good opportunity to review our workflows and processes. Our customer base had grown by a significant amount and though our team was joined by new members as well, we felt that there was room to organize the work in a more efficient way. 

What have we changed? 

  1. Onboarding for branded customers 

Our onboarding is now standardized in a form asking for all the information we need from you to get your customized versions of DMPonline ready. We have also worked on our process to make it easier to track progress and liaise with external teams (IT teams at the University of Edinburgh and in your institutions) on issues.  

  1. Streamlining our helpdesk process 

We have worked on our helpdesk process to make sure any of your queries get addressed in time and resolved within the periods laid out in our contract. Next year, we will be introducing a new software, salesforce, that should make it even easier to address your queries and issues quickly and provide us with insights where we can improve our communications with you. 

  1. Planning our work 

With major infrastructure work being required, more customers coming on board and new features being added continuously, planning work is crucial to be clearer in providing timelines for when new functionalities to DMPonline will be added. Once per year, we meet up with our colleagues at the California Digital Library to plan out upcoming work for DMPRoadmap. Furthermore, we introduced quarterly planning meetings to help us outline the work for the DMPonline team. Similar to data management planning, this is a learning process, and we will continuously evaluate and adjust our planning processes. 

What does all this mean for you? 

Hopefully, all this helps to deliver a smooth DMPonline service to you and be clearer about when new features will be added and allow you to adjust your workflows around new functionalities accordingly.  

We hope to run some virtual short user group sessions in 2021 that allow you to actively feed back on features and help us prioritise developments.  

If you require any time sensitive changes to DMPonline, please let us know with plenty of notice so we can plan around it and ensure we can deliver on time for your deadlines. For any requests, please get in touch at dmponline@ed.ac.uk