Office of Science
FAQ

User Access

User Survey Summary

Past Surveys

EMSL Survey Results [.jpg, 195kb]

EMSL is committed to looking for ways to continually improve the users’ experience. Although change cannot always be implemented overnight, we rely strongly on the input we receive from our user community, and we encourage you to continue providing feedback to our technical staff, our User Support Office, and through the bi-annual survey. Users can also provide comments and feedback to the User Advisory Committee and should feel free to contact anyone on the committee at any time.

Currently, user surveys are administered biannually and are sent only to those individuals who have accessed our resources during the prior six months. The results of the most recent survey are posted here with management responses to concerns or issues identified by our user community.

October 2008 Survey

Surveys Submitted Between October 11, 2008, and January 9, 2009.

Survey Satisfaction: 88.9 %

Survey Responses: 188

Surveys Sent: 460

Survey Response Rate: 40.9%

1. How satisfied were you with the availability of facilities and equipment?

2. How satisfied were you with performance of facilities and equipment (e.g., were they maintained to specifications for your intended use, ready when scheduled, etc.)?

3. List additional capabilities that you think EMSL should have.

User comments to this and other survey questions are below.

4. With the new knowledge gained at EMSL, I expect to (check all that apply):

5. How satisfied were you with the assistance provided by the EMSL technical staff?

6. How satisfied were you with the assistance provided by the EMSL administrative staff?

7. How appropriate and user friendly were the training and safety procedures?

8. How satisfied were you with the proposal process (e.g. submission & review)?

9. How did you learn about EMSL?

10. Is there anything that would have improved your visit to EMSL, your experience using EMSL resources, or your interactions with EMSL staff?

Although not all comments are shown, below is a representative sampling of the positive user comments received:

User Concerns and Suggestions

Comments in which users expressed concerns or suggestions for improvement have been compiled into several topical areas. Representative comments are provided below, along with EMSL's response.

EMSL strongly encourages its users to continue providing feedback through the bi-annual survey and through conversations with the new User Support Office staff. Users can also provide comments and feedback to the User Advisory Committee and should feel free to contact anyone on the committee at any time.

User Comments

Oversubscribed Instrumentation or Staffing

  • EMSL staffing and scheduling availability is becoming an increasing problem.
  • I am a computer user and the equipment is top-notch, but the queue turn-around is terrible!
  • A national lab, but it takes an act of congress to get access to all those great instruments.
  • Faster turnaround of samples [needed].

EMSL's Response

As EMSL's reputation grows as a national scientific user facility, requests for use of our resources have resulted in oversubscription on many of our key instruments. While our scientific consultants work diligently to accommodate as many user requests as possible, the number of users is impacting our scheduling and turnaround times for data. To address this issue, EMSL has rolled out a new proposal review process this year, which is intended to apply more rigor to the selection of research projects and allocation of resources each fiscal year. Our goal is to provide users with ample access to our capabilities so they can make significant progress against their research goals, thus enabling scientific discoveries that benefit the entire scientific community.

User Comments

Training

  • The process was done in a non-intimidating manner. Almost everything was straight forward.
  • Similar training each year, too much time is spent with redundant training. After training has been completed once, updates to policies and procedures should be all that is required.
  • The training and safety procedures are unnecessarily lengthy and cumbersome. The vast majority of the information is common sense and every chemist (or scientist in general) has adequate training already. It is unnecessary to go through hours and hours of reading trivial information and answering trivial questions. With the exception of a couple of sections I found this to be the most wasteful and pointless experience. On-site training on the other hand is quite useful and introduces the users to the actual facilities.
  • The training was mostly online and I could do it at a pace that was available to me.
  • "PNNL's Unclassified Cyber Security training" was very much less than useful. There were so many PNNL specific things that it was difficult if not impossible to understand what applied to me (someone only accessing the computers remotely). It was a total waste of my time.
  • Safety training-it can be shortened substantially with absolutely no harm to the information content by removing all the trivial common sense parts. For instance, the picture of a person who fell from the ladder and generally the ladder safety training- this is a kindergarten-level section. Some sections are redundant also.

EMSL's Response

There have been many stories from across the United States this past year about lab-related accidents that have resulted in loss of limb or life. Most accidents resulted from a lack of proper communication regarding procedures or from a failure to follow established procedures. Currently, users are required to take training written for long-term staff and contractors. We’ve been working with PNNL management to evaluate the training courses and streamline the material without sacrificing the important focus on safety and an accident-free environment. We hope to roll out revised training—targeted for the user community—in the coming fiscal year.

User Comments

Transparent Processes and Communication

  • The availability of MPP2 was not clear and caused us to miss using the resource. We could not run the large jobs we needed to for 3 to 4 months due to queue rules on the new computer Chinook.
  • I visit rather often, and I get a survey request every time; maybe you could decrease the frequency.
  • Not having to read articles about the importance of the PNNL logo in the bathroom. Not having to hear about the fact that marketing people are being brought in to market the science. It's hard enough to convince taxpayers to fund science; but these extras seem a bit hard to swallow.
  • [The proposal system was a] Very efficient process, works great in my opinion.
  • It [the proposal system] actually had not much paperwork involved. At least not from my side. It was refreshing to see that it could be done this way.
  • The proposal process could be substantially improved. The review process for referees is very difficult to use. The proposal process is difficult to use. However, no one in EMSL cares about fixing this as I have complained about this for >4 years and nothing is done. EMSL management does not care what responses are made in these surveys and in my opinion hides any negative comments as they are never addressed.
  • Whole process takes too long. Have had trouble submitting just about every proposal. Why do "internal" PNNL proposals need a work package. Hard to get preliminary data to start a project if I need the funding before I get it.

EMSL's Response

It's been a busy year for EMSL, with several changes to the user program. While we try to target the right level of communication to users regarding important transition dates and new policy implementation, we obviously missed the mark. This year, our Communication Manager has begun implementing an outreach and communication plan that we believe will result in a number of improvements, including improved performance and usability of EMSL's new website, the creation of an EMSL Facebook—for the web-saavy user—, and increased news highlights of user research, activities, and honors that users can receive through our listserv, "EMSL Announcements".

The User Support Office was created to centralize all activities related to a user's access—from proposal submission, to review, to badging and access— to help improve communication with our users, and to help identify areas for improvement and streamlining. The User Support Office works with EMSL or PNNL management to solve some of the global problems that hadn't previously been found when users were being processed through multiple groups. We appreciate the patience you've shown as we've trained new staff, implemented new procedures, rolled out our User Portal, and transitioned your accounts and files to this centralized office. Your feedback and suggestions—even down to revising the language and frequency of our email notifications—have become part of our ongoing list of system and process enhancements.

The proposal process is continuing to evolve, and we’re working diligently to keep our proposal tools up to date. For the first time, users submitted proposals through the new User Portal in response to the 2009 Call for Proposals. Performance during high periods of activity was problematic and we immediately identified areas that could be revised to improve performance.

In response to the PNNL staff question about requiring work package numbers, the funding information is used to confirm whether the project is federal or nonfederal and proprietary. If a proposal is submitted prior to funding awards, staff can indicate which type of programmatic funding is anticipated for the work.

Although the universal reaction is to groan when asked to complete a survey, EMSL values the collective feedback around signature areas of operations. EMSL management and our advisory committees rely on your feedback to identify areas of concern and develop performance improvement plans. Concerns raised about the survey prompted us to hire a subject matter expert to reevaluate our current format to ensure that it is a usable tool for both EMSL management and users. The report and recommendations for improvement will be presented to the User Advisory Committee at its annual meeting in September.

User Comments

Operational Delays or Downtime

  • Phase 2 Chinook is longer that I thought it will be, otherwise everything is fine.
  • Equipment was not ready when scheduled. Took almost 2 days for it to be operational.
  • Downtime schedule is very accurate and announced well before[hand].
  • Instrument had some glitches which allowed for less samples to be run than we thought, but that was due to glitches in the new software--not EMSL.
  • Connection speed with EMSL machines is sometimes extremely slow, although I am not sure where the speed is limited. May be you can improve that in the future.
  • Chinook has been up and down a lot lately. In addition, getting help with some of the software issues has been slow.

EMSL's Response

The variety of comments in this area speaks to the problems of running a user facility. It is not always possible to predict when an instrument will have operational problems, especially as our instruments age. EMSL’s current Capital Enhancement and Equipment Renovation Plan is addressing the need to upgrade or replace aging capabilities. Some of the connectivity issues this year were the result of increased cyber security measures by PNNL, and EMSL is working with PNNL to develop a revised security plan that works for our user community.

User Comments

Additional Capabilities Requested by the Users

EMSL's Response

Each year, EMSL reviews your suggestions for new or upgraded capabilities, and incorporates user needs into our strategic plan for Capability Enhancement and Equipment Renovation. As you may have heard, EMSL is receiving $60 million dollars in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding from the DOE Office of Science. This means that in the next 18 months, we will purchase high-end scientific capabilities such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers, mass spectrometers and high-powered microscopes to support our users’ research. These unique new capabilities, originally planned to be purchased through 2013 as part of our Capability Enhancement and Equipment Renovation activities, are expected to bolster our user program and keep EMSL at the state of the art.

This will be a very busy time for EMSL, but we want to assure our users that the support of your research is of highest priority to us. When all purchases are complete, you will be afforded a user facility containing the highest-quality, cutting-edge experimental and computational resources that will bring you the greatest results possible.

In the near future, we will have a website available where you will be able to see what instruments we are procuring and the status of our procurements.