Dear All:
My office had a lovely experience yesterday on a USDA Specialty Crop
Research Initiative (SCRI) application. I wanted to share with you all
because I think it might save someone out there time and aggravation.

I sent the email below to the program officer to explain what happened.

* * *
Good Morning:
We finally submitted this application successfully at 9:25 last evening
after rebuilding the entire package from "scratch". The submission
number is GRANTXXXXXXXX. We have the following three case numbers from
the Grants.gov Help Desk (1-XXXXXXXX, 1-XXXXXXXX, & 1-XXXXXXXX). None of
the three individuals we spoke to at the Help Desk could give us any
guidance toward resolution, and in fact, we were disconnected twice &
told once, "Due to the volume of calls, I'm have to hang up now."

Finally, after poking around in the NIH G.g application instructions, I
found the following paragraph:
"After providing data for each individual Senior/Key Person, click the
Next Person button at the bottom of the form to enter data for the next
Senior/Key Person. Continue in this manner until data has been provided
for up to 40 Senior/Key Persons. To ensure proper performance of this
form, after adding 20 additional Senior/Key Persons please save your
application, close the Adobe reader, and reopen it. For applications
involving more than 40 Senior/Key Persons, the “Additional Senior/Key
Person Profiles” fields will become available once data for the first 40
Senior/Key Persons has been provided."

There was no mention of this in the USDA guidelines & the Help Desk
folks, though they were told that we had 24 key personnel & that the
error message indicated the problem was with the key personnel forms,
did not mention it. It was purely by chance we were able to locate it.
Anyway, our staff stayed 3.5 hours to rebuild the package - carefully
following the above directions from the NIH guide - and were finally
able to get it to pass error check and then submit.
Obviously, my first concern is to ensure that Dr. D's proposal will be
accepted by USDA, which I believe you indicated would be possible
yesterday, since our first case number was obtained from the Help Desk
prior to the 5 p.m. deadline. My second concern is to ask your advice on
how best to share this story with the Grants.gov folks so that the word
does indeed filter to the Help Desk folks. Again, we spoke to three
different people on three separate occasions - in one case, we were on
the line with the staff member for nearly 1 hour. But this "work around"
never came up. I'm interested in ensuring none of our colleagues from
other institutions have to struggle with this arcane system bug.

* * *

Honestly, I am beyond flabbergasted that NIH has identified (and
codified!) this problem and a viable workaround, but no one at the G.g
Help Desk seemed to know about it.

This is likely too late to help anyone submitting an SCRI (due
yesterday), but if it helps for other agencies' applications, then it's
worth sharing.
--

Jennifer Donais, CRA
Associate Director
Office of Grant & Contract Administration
Research Administration Building
70 Butterfield Terrace
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
(413) 545-5888	FAX (413) 577-1595
http:://www.umass.edu/research/ogca

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