Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

Hi, Larry,

I usually do three things.

1. Return on investment calculations - every place I worked, people want to go after grants, which they know in advance they will lose time and money on. However, for one reason or another, we still apply. I do track how much extra time and value of that time we spend on those high-maintenance grants. The grants, which do not allow indirect, still exist. I do keep track of whether we lost time, money, and people, and its impact on indirect/finances. In some situations, it helped to make a decision about working harder vs. working smarter.

2. Timeliness - I document whether we, as a team, are doing everything on time or not. And by "on time" I mean "at least a day before the deadline". Why we are late, when we are late, if there was any overtime spent on a regular grant management task. What happens to our grant and project milestones. In some situations, it's a workload/man power issue. It can be a matter of availability of resources. It can be terrible planning and scheduling. However, it can go back to, again, high-maintenance grants. I document every and any emergency. I do "lessons learned" at the end of each grant writing or grant with my team in order to plan and perform better next time. Some things you just can't control. The rest should be fixed right away before it becomes a habit (nothing bad happened this time we were late, so it's ok to do it next time type of thinking).

3. Compliance checklist, geared towards an audit and timed with a quarterly internal review.

This is very home-made - nothing new and very labor-intensive. You actually spend more time documenting the process and managing people/relationships. I practiced it on/with my co-workers and trained an intern on this, who moaned and cried during all the paperwork, but later went on to a great grant management job. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it works, but can be painful. So do it at your own risk!

I would love to have something much more comprehensive, sophisticated, and easy-to-use (not too much to ask for, eh?). Hopefully, somebody... out there... has a great solution!

Gauhar Nguyen
Grants Manager
Department of Surgery/Orthopedics & Podiatry
Tripler Army Medical Center
1 Jarrett White Road
Honolulu, HI 96859-5000
808-292-9142 (Hawaii Standard Time)

-----Original Message-----
From: Research Administration List [mailto:xxxxxx@lists.healthresearch.org] On Behalf Of Lawrence Waxler
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2012 10:13 AM
To: xxxxxx@lists.healthresearch.org
Subject: [RESADM-L] Sponsored Programs Performance Metrics

Greetings

Like all of you, our lives have become much more complex over the past few years, a trend that I do not see easing up.

Looking back even five years, we didn’t have ARRA reporting, FFATA reporting, increased FCOI requirements, RCR was a smaller issue, and g.g was just cranking up, etc, etc., etc.

I even remember when summer was catch-up time!

However, when measuring what we do, we still rely heavily on how many proposals we process and how many awards we receive as the primary means of determining effectiveness and efficiency despite the fact that these measures do not capture life as we know it today.

So…….does anyone out in grantland have any insight or perspective on how to convey that by way of performance metrics?

Larry

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

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