Impact pathway - work plan and utilisation plan - structure items on a pin board
In order to plan impacts and work and thus replace parts of proposal and report texts, it is required to structure recorded data individually. For this purpose, we have developed user interfaces for an Impact Pathway, a Workingplan as well as an utilisationplan und an interim report (the latter two are mandatory component in German federal research). These interfaces function like a pinboard and are linked to the data model (or more concrete: are part of the data model). The items are displayed as cards and can be pinned and unpinned. The card is always linked to the complete item. This procedure allows the same item to be pinned several times (e.g. in the impact pathway and in the work plan).
Impact-Pathway Functionality:
More Details about the Impact Pathway:
Wolf, Birge Michaela; Lange, Doris; Michaelis, Thorsten; Moser, Andrea; John, Stefanie; Abecker, Andreas; Lossow, Stefan; Hahne, Lucia; Bollini, Andrea; Digilio, Giuseppe; Mornati, Susanna (2021): Introduce Impact-Pathways in a CRIS - support societal impact orientation in research projects and funding processes, The 16th International Conference on Open Repositories, Free access to PDF of the extended abstract: 10.5281/zenodo.10730819 
Working plan:
Versioning of complete projects
The versioning of single items implemented in DSpace-CRIS has been extended in SynSICRIS to a versioning of entire projects with all items contained therein. These versions are “unchangeable” and can made available for reading for the funder. These functions allow the following workflow:
In the proposal phase, all objectives, work and impacts are initially planned. This proposal information can then be "frozen" as an unchangeable version and made available for reading to the funding agency.
During the project livetime, the project team continues to work in the active instance and can adapt all information there. At each reporting time, a new version is created and made available to the funding agency. This gives them read access to the project information and they can use the various functions of the monitoring tool, such as filters, search functions, visualisations and switching between overviews and details, for their work.
Versioning reduces the documentation effort and makes it possible to compare different versions. When versions are compared, removed and new items are colour marked in all cards in the pin-boards. Additonally each item can be compared on the basis of the individual metadata. In addition, the project team can manually flag entries to highlight important changes compared to the proposal.
Support of Teamwork:
As the role model is build to enable teamwork, this is additionally supported by data fields for internal communication of the team, which never become visible for the funding agency.
Comment-function for funders
The work of the supervisors at the funding agency is supported by a comment function, that is only visible for the supervisers assigned to the project. This supports teamwork at the funding agency, facilitate project handovers and preparation of official statements and decisions.
Help & Bilinguality
The tool has help texts with instructions directly in the user interface and linked help pages with explanatory images. This supports the use of the tool and knowledge for impact-oriented project planning and implementation. The help is available entirely in German and already partly in English. Bilinguality in German and English is completely given for the submission forms and the entity-detail-page.
