Project priorities: just long term misses new customers, grant opportunities. Focus on money or project size misses pilot projects, does not allow diversification. Suggestion: based on merit, what allows the core to grow in new directions, expand, supports the institutional community in general - Oliver Hofmann

Hiring: 50% FTE available for a new person, enough to get someone started. Identify new technologies, hire to get an early start. Consultants can fill gaps. - Oliver Hofmann

Time: maintain an overview of timeframes (putative project starts). Wrap up projects to avoid task switching overhead as much as possible. Make time for the planning stages. - Oliver Hofmann

Expectations: be open and transparent with regards to availability, feasibility, stick to realistic time estimates and turn down work if the resources are not available. Collaborate between Cores - Oliver Hofmann

Cancer UK, Cambridge Core. Prioritize short tasks, genomic tasks. Use queuing system, use steering committee to guide on participation in long term researcher-based projects - Oliver Hofmann

usually 6-10 projects per person at any given time (ouch...) - Oliver Hofmann

Manage workload: define scope early, manage using collaboration software, deliver data in stages - Oliver Hofmann

automate and standardize - Oliver Hofmann

Training / empowering researchers the most important aspect - Oliver Hofmann

Report regularly to all groups / departments, communicate - Oliver Hofmann

Request co-authorship (but do not seem to require it) - Oliver Hofmann

Start of discussion - Oliver Hofmann

Current developments and changes: focus on next-gen - Oliver Hofmann

Benefits of training - Oliver Hofmann

Chargeback model. half of participants fully supported by their institutes - Oliver Hofmann

Hourly charges between 70 and 120$ - Oliver Hofmann

Authorship: mostly just acknowledgement, many cores with focus on master's level students - Oliver Hofmann

Collaboration: central place to share knowledge of methods, tools, evaluation. One place to deposit this information could be the http://www.bioinfo-core.org/index... - Oliver Hofmann

Try to find ways to pool information and resources (similar to the BOSC OpenBio projects) - Oliver Hofmann

Switch of topics on how to handle next-gen seq influx - Oliver Hofmann

What kind of questions are being asked, can they handle the data themselves, and is there any way to build re-useable workflows? Experience seems to be that so far no question (beyond the assembly step) has come up twice. - Oliver Hofmann

Develop method agnostic tools that help the biologist to get a handle on their own data, Eg http://www.bioinformatics.bbsrc.ac.uk/project... - Oliver Hofmann

Lots more notes over at http://www.fiamh.info/article... - Oliver Hofmann