Managing team responsibilities

This is a really great tool for two reasons; it assigns tasks and responsibilities based on your workflow steps to individual team members, and ensures internal data security between team members.  This means that team members will only see participants if they are within the workflow step they have access to and the project owner has the added security of keeping sensitive data available to only those team members who require it. I’ll discuss this in more detail below.

Assigning responsibilities

Responsibilities are tasks which are assigned to each step within a workflow. In the screen shot below you can see the description field I’ve include the tasks to be completed within each step.

You are free to construct the workflows and descriptions that best fit your project.

After designing your workflow, you can assign your team members to specific steps within the workflow which they will be responsible for. In the screen shot below, you can see different team members assigned to different steps. This means that team members will only see participant data when the participant is within a step a team member is assigned to.  As an example, the screen shot below displays the steps assigned to individual team members. You can see that User 2 has access to the Consent/Enrolment, Transcription and Completion steps. User 2 will only see participant data if they are within any of those 3 steps.

Below is a screenshot from the view of User 2.  The workflow steps User 2 has access to are coloured in blue (Consent/Enrolment, Transcription and Completion).  Of the 21 participants in this study, User 2 can only view the 7 participants within the 3 steps that User 2 is assigned to. This includes 0 in the Consent/Enrolment step, 4 in the Transcription step and 3 in the Completion step. The remaining participants are within other steps and cannot be viewed by User 2.

Remember that when assigning responsibilities, you are restricting team members access to edit the research data.  This differs from assigning a role which is in my next blog "Assigning roles to team members," which talks about accessing and editing the online project space.