Over the span of the next couple weeks, we will be welcoming our second guest blogger Alison Wellman Smith. Alison is a Business Analyst, focusing on the Grants Dashboards on the MFR project in HUIT. Alison began her career in sponsored research a little over thirteen years ago at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where her responsibilities focused on both pre and post award. From BWH, she transitioned into a post award role in the Office for Sponsored Programs here at Harvard. After six years in OSP, Alison took a position at the Harvard Kennedy School where her focus was on post award,...

As part of updating the GMAS homepage, there is a new search box at the top of the screen that allows you to search based on fund, project id, PI name, and project title/nickname. It is now easier to search from more places in GMAS, so you can spend less time moving between different projects.

If you search based on fund or project id, you will automatically be taken directly to the segment home for that project. All the other options will take you to the search results page.

You can also save a few clicks by pressing the <Enter> key instead of clicking on the search icon...

GMAS will be unavailable starting at 6pm on Friday, December 16th through 9pm on Sunday, December 18th. This outage is for the GMAS release scheduled to go live for December 19th. 

This release includes the new Edit GL Budget screen. The new screen will allow users to send new budgets, and edit existing budgets in the GL for active accounts. The screen will be available to the following roles:

• Central Administrator
• Central Financial Administrator
• Principal Investigator
• Mentor
• Department Administrator
• Lab administrator
• ...

Starting on Monday, December 19th, GMAS users will be able to submit GL budgets through GMAS. If you have never submitted a budget to the GL, you’re probably asking yourself, “why should I bother with GL budgets”. Well, here are some great reasons why:

Having a GL budget

• Assists with the increased requirements from sponsors to report budget to expenditure variances

• Helps to proactively manage/identify the need for re-budget requests to sponsors

• Reduces compliance requests of object codes that are...

GMAS tracks approvals, trainings, and certifications (referred to collectively as “Approvals”) required for requests, projects, or individuals in order to conduct sponsored research. The Research Team generates two of these approvals (Participation Agreement, and Conflict of Interest (COI)) based on each team member’s role as well as the questions answered in the request.

Participation Agreement for Harvard Employees

Generated for all members of the Research Team (anyone who is performing research.) All researchers employed by Harvard must sign...

Want to learn more about how to read an Action Memo?  Then you’re invited to attend an Action Memo session on Wednesday, October 26, 2-3pm, Kresge 202A at the  Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.   The session will cover why Action Memos are issued, how to review them and your role and responsibility in this process.  The session also includes several case studies to give you an opportunity to apply what you learn.

This session is open to everyone, but seats are limited to 32 people.  Click...

I get all kinds of requests to answer a variety of questions about sponsored research. There are annual reports, semi-annual reports, quarterly reports, and many ad hoc reports. These reports are generated for sponsors, senior leadership, for audit purposes, many of the offices in central administration, and school deans and departments. The majority of these reports pull data from GMAS and the general ledger. Every piece of data is valuable in GMAS and should be completed as accurately as possible. Every project that is entered into GMAS will appear in one of these reports eventually....

I am so happy to be participating in the GMAS blog’s first guest speaker series. For my first blog, I wanted to answer a question that gets asked a lot. Why is “Discipline” mandatory in GMAS, and how specific do I need to be (can I choose “Other”)?

The quick answer is, the discipline is mandatory because it is a CRITICAL piece of data that is used in reporting. This data is mainly used for the Higher Education Research and Development Survey (HERD) run by NSF, which is the primary source of information on R&D expenditures at U.S. colleges and universities. This is an annual...

Over the span of the next few weeks, we will be welcoming guest blogger Michael Toon. Mike, a Senior Reporting Analyst from the Office for Sponsored Programs, has been working at Harvard for over forty years. His first twenty years was spent in various positions including a Biophysicist at the Medical School, and Manager of Research Operations at Cell Biology. His second twenty years has been spent at OSP in several positions including a Financial Analyst, a Member of the Operations Team, and he also worked on GMAS development where he focused as Functional Lead migrating data into GMAS....

The GMAS training environment (https://gmastraining.harvard.edu) is refreshed on a weekly basis, on Sundays. It can be used for troubleshooting and for training. All of the data can be manipulated without any impact to real data that is used for reporting, and without sending false notifications to other users.

For questions about the training environment, please contact contactgmas@harvard.edu.

On September 8, 2016 GMAS released a few enhancements to the all documents screen and the document repository screens. 

All Documents

Added the ability to hide items which do not contain documents:

...

On August 26, 2016 GMAS released additional changes to the document repositories. 

• GMAS now allows for upper and lower case characters in an email address for users emailing into gmasdoc@camail.harvard.edu
• The allowable file upload size has been increased from 30MB to 150MB
• A time-stamp has been added to the document details
• All users who can upload documents to a document repository within a request can now also rename and edit the descriptions of documents

There is another...

GMAS has a release scheduled for August 15, 2016. The outage to perform the release will begin at 6pm on Friday the 12^th. During this time, users will be locked out of GMAS until the release has been completed.

This release includes the Document Repository upgrade. Based on user feedback, documents were streamlined to reduce the number of clicks, increase performance time, and allow for improved find-ability. This was achieved by:

• Placing all the actions on one page versus being spread across 15 pages, resulting in less clicks.
• Having the description...

The GMAS Training and Communications group is researching what to develop next for job aids, documentation, blog posts, FAQs, and future GMAS training offerings – and we want to hear from you! If you haven’t already, please take this 5-minute survey below, which we will keep open through Friday, 5/13. This is a great opportunity to directly inform what materials and resources are developed for the user community.

Click here to take the GMAS...

Client Services is the Harvard department that handles the process of assigning security to GMAS. Authorized Requestors in each Tub communicate with Client Services to coordinate the security authorization for each user; this includes awarding first-time access to new users as well as transfers and terminations.

For transferred users with GMAS access, Client Services runs a process on the first day of every month. Primary Authorized Requestors will receive an email if a user is transferring from their department. Authorized Requestors are expected to respond to the email if a user...