1. Introduction
1.1 Chapters
The chapters in these SRO Best Practices represent current best practices for SRO Projects. There are 12 chapters, including this introduction:
1. Introduction
2. Pre-Award Activity
3. Project Management
4. Study Design and Sampling
5. Security
6. Systems Development
7. Instrument Development
8. Data Management
9. Interviewer Resources and Training
10. Data Collection
11. Post Collection Processing
12. Archiving and Documentation
These chapters provide guidelines for activities throughout a project’s lifecycle, from pre-award of project funds through closeout of the project. It is our expectation that all Project Leaders – both of overall projects and of smaller components of projects – will use this document as a key reference at multiple stages.
Chapter 3, Project Management, describes best practices for managing SRO projects, whether data collection or developmental. Developmental projects are non-data collection projects that have a defined work scope and budget, such as development of technical systems, quality assurance tools, etc. These projects generally impact SRO infrastructure and operations across projects, and require many of the same processes and documentation as sponsored projects.
Each project has one person, the Project Leader, who has overall responsibility for meeting project requirements across SRO’s standard tasks that fall within a work breakdown structure (WBS):
01 Project Management
02 Sampling
03 Questionnaire Development
04 CAI Programming
05 CASIC Systems Development
06 Hiring
07 Training
08 Main Data Collection
09 Post Collection Processing
10 Weighting and Estimation
11 Final Data Deliverables
SRO expects that Project Leaders will tailor management practices to meet the needs of projects of varying sizes, work scope, and complexity.
1.2 Standards
In 2020, SRC revised the Survey Research Operations Standards for data collection projects. Where relevant, sections from these standards appear at the beginning of chapters.
1.3 Project Deliverables
Each chapter then lists deliverables required for all projects, as well as conditional deliverables. Project work scope may or may not require the latter. The document SRO Mandatory and Conditional Project Deliverables lists all deliverables across chapters.
1.4 Toolbox
Throughout the SRO Best Practices there are links to individual items in the SRO Best Practices Toolbox, which provides resources to facilitate project activities (e.g., templates, examples, Web sites, checklists, etc). Links appear underlined and in blue font. Some tools require login credentials, which is footnoted when relevant. There is a link to the full toolbox with all SRO Best Practices tools on the menu at the top right of the website. This full toolbox can be searched, sorted, and filtered according to your needs.