BudgetOverview2014
Short overview of the ST budget 2014 and some discussion items for the future
After the 2014 budget was settled in the "huge excel sheet" form it took a while before I got time to convert it to something more readable. The result is below, and I've decided to focus on time instead of on money this time. At the end I collect four items for discussion.
Table 1 [Time budget] in units of full time equivalents (FTEs). A few FTEs are paid from other sources (head of programme, head of division, Area of advance, part time work, etc.) and that is not part of this summary (TODO: include it). The ST division people have (for this presentation) been mapped to the headings Teach, ProSec, FP and FM and the projects to those headings plus "Lang" for the REMU project. (There may be some errors in the assignments, but I believe the overall picture is fairly accurate.)
| Funding source | Teach | ProSec | FP | FM | Lang | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Education | 3.24 | 2.52 | 2.58 | 2.02 | 0 | 10.36 |
| Faculty funding | 0 | 1.18 | 1.17 | 2.55 | 0 | 4.90 |
| External research | 0 | 11.65 | 11.48 | 2.47 | 3.00 | 28.60 |
| Total | 3.24 | 15.35 | 15.23 | 7.03 | 3.00 | 43.85 |
The two first rows show that the base line funding (education + faculty funding) supports around 15 people and the third row shows that around twice that many work on externally funded research. Looking at the columns we can see that ProSec and FP each keep around 15 people busy, FM is half that size and Teach half of FM. But looking at the first row we can see that Teach still does more teaching that any other single group.
Table 2 [Column distribution] shows how the manpower is distributed over different tasks within each group. Here we can see the Teach group (3.24) doing full time teaching, ProSec and FP doing 1/6 teaching (but also a quite a few other tasks) and FM doing around 1/3 teaching. Lang is the REMU research project which is new and therefore difficult to fit in so I put it in a separate column.
| Funding source | Teach | ProSec | FP | FM | Lang | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Education | 100% | 16% | 17% | 29% | 0% | 24% |
| Faculty funding | 0% | 8% | 8% | 36% | 0% | 11% |
| External research | 0% | 76% | 75% | 35% | 100% | 65% |
| Total | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
Table 3 [Row distribution] shows how the manpower on each task is distributed between the groups. In the first row we can see that the (by far) smallest group does almost a third of all the teaching and that the other three groups share the other 2/3 fairly evenly (despite being of different size). In the second row the current strategic build-up of formal methods is clearly visible: half of the faculty funded work is done in this group. This is clearly not a stable state; 40, 40, 20 is a more reasonable stable state of faculty funding given the current group size distribution. That would mean +0.8 positions for ProSec and FP and -1.5 for FM within 2 years (to be compensated by an inflow of new external funding in the FM area).
| Funding Source | Teach | ProSec | FP | FM | Lang | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Education | 31% | 24% | 25% | 19% | 0% | 100% |
| Faculty funding | 0% | 24% | 24% | 52% | 0% | 100% |
| External research | 0% | 41% | 40% | 9% | 10% | 100% |
| Total | 7% | 35% | 35% | 16% | 7% | 100% |
Summary: The ST division (time) budget consists of 15 FTEs on internal funding (10 education + 5 research) and 29 FTEs on external funding. This means a steady inflow of new grants is important (disc. item 1). The current (successful) strategic investment is mainly in the FM area - we need to think about what to do next (disc. item 2). The teaching is very unevenly distributed and this is not a long term stable state (disc. item 3).
Final words. Despite our best efforts to spend some of the accumulated surplus from eralier years (around 6M), the budget is currently almost in balance (-0.5M = -1%). This means there is still some space to use money (around 1.5M/y for four years) for other "strategic recruitment", seed funding or curriculum development (disc. item 4). We have AlRu in the pipeline for a permanent position very soon, prel. MaMy for an AssProf position in the autumn and for 2015 I speculate that we can announce two new faculty positions as Assoc. Prof. (to start early 2016). Co-funding these four recruitments may very well cost more than our current surplus.
Discussion items
- steady inflow of new grants
- strategic investments (distribution of faculty funding)
- distribution of teaching
- future positions and co-funding