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I am an independent consultant, but I'm also a part-time employee at a university that is starting up a statistical consulting center. I'm helping out with this and wanted to develop some SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for things like insuring that we don't analyze data from a non-IRB approved study in humans. I'm also interested in a "customer satisfaction" survey that could be sent out afterward to give us feedback on how to improve.

Does anyone out there have some SOPs from their academic statistical consulting center? Anything else that you can share easily so I don't have to reinvent the wheel would be greatly appreciated.

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Stephen Simon
Independent Statistical Consultant
P. Mean Consulting
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How is it being staffed?  For example, will it be by people who already have the appropriate degrees and/or experience, or will it be by (under?)graduate students whom you'll oversee?

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Jerry Dallal
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Stephen,

We have our consulting request form (http://www.cstat.msu.edu/services/consultation/consultationform.aspx) set up to ask whether the project involves research with (or data about) human subjects. If the client clicks "yes", then we also pop up additional controls to ask for the IRB status of the project and the IRB log number. That way we get some basic data before we we even assign a consultant to a project.

In terms of a satisfaction survey, we have been using SurveyMonkey to send out a short survey (but we still need to overhaul the process to find a way to improve the response rate). Recently, I've been focused on upgrading our client tracking system to better track and report on our activities. I think it's essential to have a good database to track cases, effort, and scholarly products such as the grant proposals you've helped with, the funded grants you have supported, the citations for publications and presentations you have supported and/or co-authored, and so on.

If you want to discuss how we run our center at greater length, just send me a private message and we can exchange phone numbers.
 
FYI, we also have a list of links to other university-based statistical consulting centers on our website at  http://www.cstat.msu.edu/beyond/other_centers_other_univ.aspx. If anyone has links to centers that we missed, we'd be happy to update the list.


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Steven J. Pierce, PhD
Associate Director
Center for Statistical Training and Consulting
Michigan State University
www.cstat.msu.edu
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The relevant homepage for such things here is the Statistical Sciences Core in the Center for Clinical Investigation: http://cci.case.edu/cci/ssc/

Of note is the fact that this unit is almost completely separate from the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

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Ralph O'Brien, Professor
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Case Western Reserve University
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-22-2010 08:41
From: Steven Pierce
Subject: SOPs for an academic statistical consulting center

Stephen,

We have our consulting request form (http://www.cstat.msu.edu/services/consultation/consultationform.aspx) set up to ask whether the project involves research with (or data about) human subjects. If the client clicks "yes", then we also pop up additional controls to ask for the IRB status of the project and the IRB log number. That way we get some basic data before we we even assign a consultant to a project.

In terms of a satisfaction survey, we have been using SurveyMonkey to send out a short survey (but we still need to overhaul the process to find a way to improve the response rate). Recently, I've been focused on upgrading our client tracking system to better track and report on our activities. I think it's essential to have a good database to track cases, effort, and scholarly products such as the grant proposals you've helped with, the funded grants you have supported, the citations for publications and presentations you have supported and/or co-authored, and so on.

If you want to discuss how we run our center at greater length, just send me a private message and we can exchange phone numbers.
 
FYI, we also have a list of links to other university-based statistical consulting centers on our website at  http://www.cstat.msu.edu/beyond/other_centers_other_univ.aspx. If anyone has links to centers that we missed, we'd be happy to update the list.


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Steven J. Pierce, PhD
Associate Director
Center for Statistical Training and Consulting
Michigan State University
www.cstat.msu.edu
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