Management: Governance—Finances—Human Resources

The focus of this chapter is the internal operation of an animal program. The first part deals with organization structure, including the components of an animal program, the reporting structure, checks and balances that ensure compliance with all relevant regulations, and financial sustainability. The second part delves into the services associated with an animal program, including research cores, research and development activities, and the outsourcing of services. The third section focuses on the finances of an animal program, including income and expenses, the resulting net cash flow, and how a deficit is handled, should the program have an operational deficit. This section also touches on cost accounting methodologies. The last section focuses on staffing, including operational structure of staff and metrics used to determine staffing requirements. The chapter ends with a brief discussion about the best approach for programs to benchmark themselves against their peers. The take-home message is that there is more than one way to have a robust, compliant, and financially sustainable program. The key to having such a program is to involve the expertise of staff at every level in decision-making, emphasizing the need for more “performance-based standards,” i.e., standards that meet regulatory requirements while being both practical and feasible for the program to achieve, than “engineering standards,” i.e., prescriptive ways to achieve the standards needed to meet regulatory requirements.