Node: ELIXIR Sweden
Authors: Elin Kronander and Niclas Jareborg, heads of data management
Topics: Why strategy, Who to involve
Vision and mission statements can help clarify what a team works on, why it matters and who the work is for.
During 2020 the Data management staff of the Swedish Node went from two to five persons; from a pair of persons having unspoken and not well-defined remits and roles, to a team that needed more clarity on what to work with and why. Our approach to bring more clarity was to organise a workshop around Vision and Mission statements for the team. The Vision statement defined a desired future position and Mission defined overall objectives to work towards the Vision, and approaches to reaching them.
We ended up with a Vision that did not focus on a desired state that lay within the team itself, but instead focused on the recipients of the outputs of the team. So “A group of people can do something because of reasons” rather than “The team will be world-class at something”. This way of formulating the vision defined our will to create impact, for whom, and for what reasons.
Our vision statement ended up being: “Swedish Life Science researchers apply good data management practices so that the research outputs produced are available to the global research community and to society at large, according to the principles of Open Science, Reproducible Research, and FAIR.”
Given the Vision, we then worked on what our Mission should be, taking our organisational environment, resources and competences into account. Which areas should the focus of our activities be on? What are overarching objectives to work towards for these areas? This resulted in us defining three core areas: Support, Training and Collaboration. For each of these, we formulated high level objectives, as well as functional statements about what we should focus our activities on to work towards the objectives.
Here is an example mission statement:
Support: Swedish life science researchers shall have access to data management support to be able to manage their research data according to international best practice.
- Develop procedures for providing efficient data management support to research projects throughout the research data lifecycle
- Provide data management planning knowledge and resources and tools for research projects
- Provide support and resources and tools for data submission to recommended community deposition databases
- Provide support and resources and tools to enable reproducible research
For several years, our Vision & Mission was the only guiding “strategy” for the team activities. Only later on, when the team grew to become even bigger and our activities expanded, did we formulate a full strategy for our operations. The full Vision & Mission statements can be found in our strategy document.