Science Administration across Divisions, Laboratories, and Offices of the
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
Maryann D’Alessandro, Ann Berry, John Decker, Amia Downes, and Amanda Harney
Background
HHS/CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is the federal
agency responsible for conducting research and making recommendations for the prevention of
work-related injury, illness and death. NIOSH has a diverse portfolio of scientific activities
including basic research, clinical/applied occupational safety and health research, systems
research, policy research and applications, and several Congressionally mandated service
programs. NIOSH has a professionally diverse staff of 1,200 scientists assigned between its
split Office of the Director in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, GA and six locations across the
nation.
NIOSH has a well formulated process to establish research priorities and conduct its
Congressionally mandated service programs. Research priorities are established by considering
multiple inputs to the research process. For example, NIOSH incorporates suggestions and input
provided through strong stakeholder partnerships (often as steering committees) involving
federal agencies, unions, labor, manufacturers, academia, and other interested parties. High level
scientific reviews provide another input to NIOSH programs including over twelve National
Academies' reviews conducted over the past five years and a well-established and rigorous peer
review process for all research activities. NIOSH also has a Board of Scientific Counselors
which provides guidance on the Institute's research activities.
In an effort to maintain a central information repository to track the wide array of research and
support activities in which NIOSH staff are involved, the Institute developed and continually
improves the NIOSH Project Planning and Management system (NPPM). This system allows
system users internal to NIOSH to analyze project and some program level data such as funding,
personnel time, goals, outputs, and outcomes.
Research prioritization identifies relevant research focus; however, each NIOSH Division,
Laboratory, or Office (DLO) is permitted to establish and use its own processes and procedures
to define its annual portfolio of specific research projects and support activities that populate the
NPPM. It has been assumed that great similarity exists across the Institute as to how these
annual activities are conducted. However, there has been no recent analysis of how these
processes are defined.
Initiative Objective
The NIOSH Science Administration Health of Science (HoS) Committee defined and conducted
an initiative to gather information regarding how each DLO determines its annual plans for
specific research and service activities. An analysis of this information is being used to produce
“best practices” that serve as a tool to identify potential approaches to enhance individual
program/budget formulation processes. Further, these results will be used to develop additional
HoS metrics in support of the broader goal to measure the performance and improve the capacity
of the NIOSH research effort.
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Methodology
The initiative is being conducted in five steps: (1) an initial survey of presently used processes
via an interview (60-90 minutes) with key representatives of each DLO, including determining
the existence and status of process documentation; (2) a review of the survey results and followup activities to clarify initial information and define additional requests to ensure that all
available and pertinent information has been obtained; (3) an analysis of the data; (4) a report on
NIOSH program and budget formulation processes, including the definition of best practices;
and (5) presentation and discussion of the conclusions with NIOSH senior management.
Data Collection
Initial survey interviews with the twelve NIOSH DLOs were completed between SeptemberNovember 2010. The interviews were conducted against a uniform set of questions designed to
fully define the annual budget and program formulation process each organization uses: (1)
Documentation of current process; (2) Schedule for making decisions; (3) Assignment of roles;
(4) Evaluation criteria; (5) Process for ongoing projects; (6) Process for new start projects; (7)
Participation in emergency response activities; and (8) Management of emerging issues. Followup information was obtained to clarify gaps.
Preliminary Analysis and Results
Even before data collection was completed it became apparent that wide variability existed
across the Institute as to the degree of formality different DLOs used for their annual planning
cycles. This was clearly demonstrated by the varied documentation for the majority of the
processes used.
This can be explained in part because of the different funding sources that are available to each
respective group. Thus, the potential to receive funds from NIOSH’s intramural National
Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) competition process (a primary source of funds for
many organizations) was premised upon complying with a well-documented and scheduled
process managed by the NIOSH NORA Coordination Office. However, project selection in
support of other programmatic initiatives (e.g., requiring the discretionary funds) were subject to
varying levels of rigor and comparative analysis. More significantly, few of the surveyed DLOs
conducted a unified process where all of its research and support activities were “competitively”
analyzed for the purpose of formulating its future year’s program and support activities.
A similar diversity was found in the specific attributes of the various processes used by each
organization, i.e., evaluation criteria, management of emerging issues. Almost every unit
conducted a rigorous mid-year review of the status of on-going projects. These reviews
uniformly involved broad participation of researchers, project leaders, supervisors, branch chiefs,
and the organization’s senior management. Varying degrees of formality of documentation were
employed, but each review was conducted in an exacting manner. It can be inferred that these
reviews did provide information useful to subsequent funding decisions. However, few made a
direct and formal connection between the two.
Many organizations used written quarterly reports as an additional way to monitor performance.
All were paper-based reviews.
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Across the Institute there was uniformity in complying with the requirements for project
reporting in NIOSH’s NPPM system. Compliance with its timing requirements often served as
the planning schedule for the various units.
Best Practices
A number of Best Practices have been identified. The best practices will made available for
consideration and adoption into each organization’s management system.
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