Dear Colleagues:

Professional Effort tracking is more critical now than ever, not just
for newer
institutions but also for the more established institutions as well.

With the advent of increasing computerized tracking across government
funders,
increased scrutiny of compliance issues can be expected by all.  While
in the past
these issues could only be tracked by pulling paper files, algorithms
used on data
by government agencies will help track professional effort, intellectual
property
issues, and more.

From a functional perspective, you have to be able to track effort both
actual and
projected effort (based on pending applications) for your more
productive faculty.

An example is the Bioinformatics who might be a very productive
investigator who
spends from 1% to 15% of her or his professional effort on many grants.

In order to avoid possible overcommitment, both actual and committed
potential
Professional Effort needs to be tracked centrally by institutions rather
than in
individual departmental data marts.

A form alone cannot accomplish this as a coordinated institutional
approach
needs to be in place, regardless of institutional size, age, or
reputation.

As far as responsibility is concerned for the stuardship of such data,
one has
to look at the responsibilities of the departments in question:

Human Resources / Personnel:

This organizational sub-entity is responsible for ensuring that
personnel decisions
support the productivity of the organization in question to the greatest
extent given
the available economic resources of the organization and the available
intellectual and
productive capacity of the set of available employees for specific
functions.  This can
be including: hiring, firing, transferring of personnel and determining
qualifications.

Sponsored Programs / Grants and Contracts Office:

According to the SRA / NCURA topical outline at:

http://grants.psu.edu/psu/res/topout.pdf

Reference: IV. C. 8.

Effort Distribution and Reporting is an agreed-upon responsibility of
these offices by
professional consensus.

How institutions across the country handle their compliance will affect
the successes
of the Research Administration / Grants Departments, their employees,
their faculty,
and ultimately the institutions they serve.

In short, due diligence is required and practice must catch up to
theory.

Regards,

Martin Emerson Low
Columbia University

>
> I need help! I need to know who handles the time and effort tracking
> of employees on grants and contracts. I realize this is a major
> auditing issue and we're a young institution trying to get our "ducks"

> in order. The problem is that as the grants office, we've been
> submitting the paperwork for charging individuals to the respective
> grants/contracts as well as making changes as they come up. We don't
> maintain a database to generate reports of where each individual is
> charged.
>
> If anyone has a good system in place, I would appreciate any and all
> suggestions. Also, is maintaining and overseeing the time and effort
> tracking a function of the Sponsored Research office or Human
> Resources or some other dept??
>
> Thanks!!!!
>
> Matt
>
> Matthew D. Katz, MHA
>
> Assistant Vice President,
>
> Sponsored Research and Contract Management
>
> Western University of Health Sciences
>
> 309 E. 2nd Street
>
> Pomona , CA 91766
>
> (909) 469-5567
>
> (909) 469-5569 FAX
>
> www.westernu.edu <http://www.westernu.edu>
>
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======================================================================
Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including
subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available
via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists")
======================================================================

======================================================================
 Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including
 subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available
 via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists")
======================================================================