Easing the burden of grant processing

By Nancy Wick
University Week

This quarter the Grant and Contract Initiative (GCI) will be offering demonstrations of the preliminary version of a system it has been working on for processing grants and contracts. The demos are scheduled from noon to 1 p.m., Friday, April 20 in 301 Miller and from noon to 1 p.m., Wednesday, April 25 in D-209 Health Sciences Center.

The system - which GCI administrator Gretchen Davis says isn’t quite a prototype - is the first attempt to pull together everything that’s needed to create a completely online system of grant development and award management.

And creating such a system is the goal of the GCI, a UIF-funded project now in its third year. The GCI is a component of the University Services Renewal Project (USER) which is designed to streamline critical University support services through Web-based technologies. Guidance for the project is provided by a steering committee. (See http://www.washington.edu/user/hr_payroll/people/steering/index.html).

Last summer the GCI debuted a Web site called the Grant and Contract Guide (http://www.washington.edu/research/guide/) where they collected in one place all the information about grants that had been scattered in numerous offices across campus. The Web site has been racking up more than 20,000 hits per month. Now the GCI team is working on a system whereby a researcher can go online and actually fill out a grant application, get it through the approval process and manage the grant after it has been received.

“We have been looking at systems created for this purpose all over the country to try to find one that would meet our needs,” Davis says.

The system the group finally settled on is being custom built on campus and is based on a software platform called Ariba that was originally purchased for use in University Stores.

“We’ve always envisioned being able to leverage Ariba for purposes other than purchasing,” said Tim McAllister, a senior applications systems engineer who is the technical lead for the project. “It’s designed for entering information online and sending it through an approval process, and that’s just what we needed.”

Overall, Davis and McAllister say, the system needed to be able to do five things: 1) develop electronic forms, 2) pull information from central systems such as the payroll system (HEPPS),
3) push data into those central systems, 4) attach necessary documents and 5) accommodate to a complicated routing and approval process.

Using two common research forms - the National Institute of Health’s application form (called a PHS398) and Grant and Contract Services’ application form (the GC1) - as a test, the group is satisfied that the system can do all those things. Now it plans to show what it has to campus people involved with grants to get their input as the design process continues.

“We plan to begin beta testing in the fall,” Davis says.

The new system, as Davis and McAllister describe it, will be based on functional categories of data rather than sponsor forms. When researchers call up a form on the Web, they will be prompted to supply information according to the kind of grant being applied for. However, only when researchers are ready to output the data will it take the form of the specific application they are making.

“We wanted to do two things in our design,” McAllister says. “We wanted to make sure researchers only had to enter information once and we wanted to be able to draw information from other sources.”

To accomplish the first objective, information requested will be logically grouped and will flow to where it is needed on a particular form. To accomplish the second, the system will be able to draw information from central systems such as HEPPs. For example, if the researcher lists a UW employee working on the grant, that person’s current biographical sketch and salary information would be pulled automatically across the various forms wherever it’s applicable.

“If you look at the history of how forms develop,” McAllister says, “you’ll see that they’re rarely reorganized in a logical fashion. Institutions tend to keep the same format that people are familiar with and add to it. That’s why they often do such things as ask for the same information twice.”

The new system will also be able to supply standard information such as the congressional district that is requested on some applications.

“We want to make it possible for the researcher to get all information from one source,” Davis says.

She said an important capability of the system will be to route and approve proposals electronically, allowing researchers to know where their proposal is at all times. And, those who need to give approval will all receive the form at the same time, thus speeding up the process. Davis said the system will also create an “audit trail” so that interested parties will be able to trace where changes were made to the proposal.

After the demonstrations of the system this quarter, interested people will be able to make suggestions or serve on resource groups to improve it if they want to.

The new system isn’t the only thing the GCI is working on. Davis says there have been many recent improvements to the Grant and Contract Guide. A table of contents has been added, and the group is working on Frequently Asked Questions. There is also a news section where new additions or items of special interest can be highlighted.

Davis recently held a meeting of representatives from about 15 offices that link to the guide. Even though they all hold information relevant to the grant and contract process, several had never met face to face.

“What tends to happen with a process like this is that people know a lot about their little piece of it, but they don’t necessarily have the big picture of how it works,” Davis says. “I thought that bringing them together would help them see the big picture and what part their office plays in it.”

While all the high-tech work is going on, Grant and Contract Services has also been striving to streamline its processes. Davis says some of this work has resulted in researchers now having access to detailed subcontract instructions (GIM 7) and training for use of the NSF Fastlane. See the sidebar for details of the streamlining processes.

Davis and McAllister both talk about the enthusiasm of all the employees who have worked on the system development. “Electronic work flow has the potential to save researchers and administrative staff a lot of time and effort in the proposal development and approval process,” McAllister says. “People have been very eager to learn how they can apply this technology.”

To learn more about the GCI, go to their Web site at http://www.washington.edu/research/gci.

Many grant, contract improvements already in place

Process improvements that have already been made in grant and contract units are listed below:

Grant & Contract Services (GCS)