I think that things are settling down, or that I'm getting more comfortable in my role, although my mind has still felt all over the place. This week I'm helping to run two workshops for the physical launch of RESHub, a centre for researcher development in our new library building on Broadway.
Last week a lot of what I was doing involved small software projects (in terms of numbers of users, or size of the centres which use them) which are taking up too much time in terms of process and bureaucracy. This sort of impedance mismatch is hard to avoid because a big system will come with a project budget, a solution designer, the whole shebang. A smaller project will not have any of that but still intersects with the same sorts of concerns - data classification, security, how it integrates with existing systems - and consequently needs to meet the same standards.
The research space gets a lot of these due to the nature of the work, but also some come our way by accident, because the software was being bought by a research centre, though it may not be research software; any more than the couches in their waiting room are research furniture.