Information Manager and Programmer

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Detail information about job Information Manager and Programmer. Terms and conditions vacancy

Sheffield University Management School, the Faculty of Social Sciences’ largest department, has achieved accreditation from the three largest and most influential business school associations: AACSB, AMBA, and EQUIS.

The mission of Sheffield University Management School is to use our world class research base to develop knowledgeable and employable students, promote socially-responsible work practices, and have a positive impact on organisations and society throughout the world. We sustain a research-intensive environment that creates, advances, and disseminates knowledge with respect to management inquiry, for the benefit of students, private and public sector organisations, and society in general. Our relocation to a fully refurbished building in June 2013 provides modern facilities in which to achieve our ambitions.

The “Behaviour in Teams” (BiT) project began in 2015 with a post-doctoral fellowship examining how behaviour in team meetings can predict team performance, and whether providing feedback to teams and individuals can lead to changes in behaviour over a series of meetings. More broadly, it seeks to develop methods that can assist in students and others learn how they can work more effectively in teams.

Its principal methodology is an observation and coding scheme in which team meetings are witnessed by an external observer. Using a bespoke app, the observer codes each interaction in the meeting, and feeds back information about behaviours to individuals and teams after each meeting. Then changes in behaviour over the course of a week’s meetings are analysed, and compared with team performance, perceptions of team working, and perceptions of each team member’s contribution. In 2017 we observed 165 undergraduate engineering student teams engaged in intensive, week-long modules, and were also able to examine experimentally how providing teams with feedback affected behaviour compared with not giving feedback.

The project is now being expanded so that the method developed can be rolled out to more settings, with more flexibility. As part of this expansion, the core team is being expanded to include three behavioural researchers, a skills developer, and this post – an Information Manager and Programmer. You will have overall responsibility for the capture, storage, and processing of data within the project, and in particular helping to develop the current app for different platforms and devices, and developing and maintaining systems to allow the automated transfer and storage of project data. The successful candidate will hold a good honours degree (or equivalent experience) and experience of working with large databases. Knowledge of big data tools and analytic methods, cloud-based solutions, and smartphone and tablet app design are essential.

Currently, the BiT coding procedure uses an iPad app developed in Livecode by Professor Rod Nicolson, for real-time coding of behaviours in team meetings by observers. One of the principal purposes of this post is to help develop this app, in particular for use on different platforms and different devices. You will work closely with Professor Nicolson (now a visiting professor at the University of Sheffield) to enable this development.

Our website offers more information about all aspects of the School’s activity. Please see http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/management for more details.

This post is full-time and fixed-term until 31 October 2019. The closing date for applications is 18 September 2017.