It is always sad to learn of another painful submission.  May I
repeat that you cannot expect much help from the "Help Desk" as they
are only working from scripts provided to them by General Dynamics
Information Technology (GDIT).  I have come to believe that GDIT does
not really know how problematic the system is.  Help Desk staff
especially  know little about specific Agency applications.  Perhaps
the questions were better directed to the USDA.  Or here :)  The
listserv is the "Grants.gov SELF-help desk."

I would like to add your case to my list of problems.  The top two
being fixing the Role on Project for one Key Person and printing all
budget years.  Those who watched the webcast yesterday heard that G.g
knows about these but is ignoring them.  Maybe GDIT cannot fix
these.  If this were my programming I would be ashamed to leave such
problems in a system.

Jennifer, I do no understand the actual problem you had. A bad error
message is part of the problem, are there any good ones, besides
wrong DUNS?  More bad programming.

 Did you have more than 40 key persons, and could not enter them
all.  What was the actual error message.
Why did you need to rebuild the application?

Thanks for sharing this experience with the helpful information.  I
wonder if an S2S program would have avoided this?

Bob
------------------------------
Robert Beattie
UMich e-Business Point of Contact
UMich Grants.gov Liaison
Managing Senior Project Representative for Electronic Research
Administration
Division of Research Development and Administration
University of Michigan
xxxxxx@umich.edu   (734) 936-1283

On Apr 16, 2009, at 11:10 AM, Jennifer Donais wrote:

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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