Initiative engages staff in correcting process issues

Precision and accuracy in the lab have made UW–Madison a top research university, but its grants management process deserves the same attention to detail.

Just setting up a grant so researchers can spend and bill their sponsors takes 113 days, on average, says Stephanie Gray, a managing officer for the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs.

“If you look at the cutting-edge work that’s occurring in some of these fields, two to three months of delays can really impact someone’s ability to be at that forefront,” Gray says.

But change is coming, Gray says, thanks to the work of her Administrative Process Redesign (APR) team, which may have cut the award setup process from 113 to just 19 days by eliminating repetitious work and improving interdivision communication.

Gray is one of more than 200 campus employees addressing process improvement through APR by emphasizing cross-campus engagement. APR involves teams of employees, trained in Lean Six Sigma process improvement techniques, accurately identifying and correcting defects in business processes.

Gray’s team is one of four launched recently to tackle grant-related inefficiencies, and Graduate School Dean Martin Cadwallader says APR is up to the task.

“I’m delighted that we are using APR as a vehicle for systematically streamlining research administration processes across campus,” Cadwallader says.

While Gray’s team is delivering major budgetary benefits — such as increasing grant-related cash-flow by eight-fold — other teams are working to clarify, rather than shorten, the convoluted process.

“The rules are getting more complicated, the accountability is getting more stringent with auditing … all this stuff we didn’t have to worry about 20 years ago,” says Teri Balser, an associate professor in soil sciences.

Balser remembers scrambling through WISDM, UW–Madison’s complicated grant reporting system, during a late-night call from a prospective graduate student who needed to know if Balser’s research grants could fund an assistant.

“I didn’t know how to get the information myself, so I had to tell the student ‘I can’t answer you right now,’” she says.

By morning, the student was gone.

Balser’s story is just one example of the communication obstacles separating UW–Madison researchers from administrators. It’s also the main reason Balser recently joined an APR team dedicated to improving the grant-tracking process.

Balser says her team is still analyzing interviews to decide what information researchers need, but that their ideal solution would create a standardized grant management tool so busy researchers wouldn’t need to spend grant dollars on bookkeepers.

The risk of blind budgeting for grants is just too great, Balser says, since researchers frequently overspend while trying to utilize every last penny, only to find outstanding charges posted after the grant closes.

“Say someone overspends by $10,000 … they can’t just take $10,000 from another grant, so researchers are finding themselves stuck,” Balser says. In such cases, their department either pays the difference or transfers the funds from a less restrictive fund, like a gift.

Overspent grants account for only some of the cost transfers needed to correct grant balances each year, according to Adam Whitehorse, a senior accountant for the College of Engineering. The documentation federal auditors require to justify cost transfers makes corrections even more taxing, Whitehorse said, and he is leading an APR team to reduce transfers and their negative impacts.

The current transfer process also takes so long that researchers, who can wait months without knowing if their transfer request was lost or stalled, sometimes request another transfer only to have the original post soon after.

“So now it’s up to the department to do another cost transfer to reverse the duplicative work. That’s rework times three,” Whitehorse says.

Cost transfers aren’t the only thorns in the grant process, though.

More and more grants are requiring UW–Madison to share research costs. Some sponsors, such as the National Science Foundation, require UW–Madison to cover some costs, while many departments allow researchers to voluntarily cost share in certain situations.

Complicating matters further, UW–Madison has no concrete policy for when, if ever, voluntary cost sharing is appropriate, says Chip Quade, who heads an APR team assigned to standardize cost sharing. The problem is exacerbated by the growing and largely false perception that sponsors are more likely to fund a proposal if it includes voluntary cost sharing.

“The total salary dollars UW–Madison cost shares in any given year is $18 million, and we could be getting a lot of that back from the granting agencies because the majority of it’s voluntary,” Quade says.

The four grant-related teams will roll out solutions this fall as a fifth team begins work to improve the process of closing out a grant award.

APR teams continue to improve campus process

Additional campuswide process improvements are on the horizon as a result of the work of five other Administrative Process Redesign (APR) teams.

• End IT access for employees leaving the university: In September, a new standardized, automated notification system will be in place for ending IT access for many campuswide IT systems.
• NetID access for new employees prior to their arrival: Having access to core campus IT services such as WiscMail, MyWebSpace, and the MyUW portal before their first day of work will soon be a possibility for all new employees. A change to an existing system by DoIT staff is making this happen. Implementation is scheduled for October.
• Decrease the time it takes to gain IT access for new employees: Supervisors will be able to initiate the process for getting IT access for their new employees before their first day of work because data authorization forms will no longer require employee signatures. A universal data compliance agreement will be signed by employees at the time they activate their NetID. It is being tested first for the mainframe (3270) system with the hope that other systems will follow. Implementation is scheduled for October.
• Making the transfer of non-salary costs more efficient: Changes being implemented to improve efficiency and reduce the time it takes to process nonsalary cost transfers include separate forms for processing grant and nongrant cost transfers; new policies and procedures; offering training and certification in the use of the JET tool so that schools and colleges can directly enter nongrant corrections into SFS; and eliminating the need for a validation step in Accounting Services for the nongrant cost transfer process. A pilot training program of the new process and JET usage is planned for later this month.
• Improve HR process for requesting/approving overload: A new Web form will be implemented to speed up the paper-based process for requesting and approving overload. This should reduce confusion about the process and pay staff on time for overload. The roll-out to campus is scheduled for this fall.

For more information, visit Administrative Process Redesign.