Executive Summary

The September 2017 Grants Management Application Suite (GMAS) release will be available to users on Monday, September 25, 2017. The release includes several major enhancements (details below) and serves as a major milestone in GMAS and HUIT history by moving the application to the Cloud. The move is directly tied to HUIT’s #1 FY18 goal of moving as many applications as possible to the Cloud. Read more about HUIT’s strategic goals and our Cloud program.

Highlighted features of this release:

Committed Effort Enhancements:

The segment Research Team has been re-designed to improve the ability to enter (current and prospective commitments), modify, and correct commitments for research team members. Additionally, users will now be able to view a research team member’s current, past, and future commitments. Full details of the committed effort-related features are below.

Converted Organization Profile:

The screen for external organizational profiles has been converted to the new GMAS “look and feel;” additional features have been implemented to support subrecipient monitoring and provide transparency into Harvard’s research relationships with external sponsors. New features include:

• Adding and editing organizational profiles is now easier.
• A new panel at the top of the screen includes a listing of instances in which the organization appears as a sponsor, prime sponsor, or subrecipient for pending, active, closed, and not funded segments.
• Depending on user security, links direct to projects to view additional details.
• The page also includes an Excel download of the organization’s affiliations.  

GMAS will be unavailable to users from 7:00PM EST on Friday, September 22, 2017 through the start of business at 8:00AM EST Monday, September 25, 2017.

The next GMAS release is tentatively scheduled for the December 2017/January 2018 timeframe. This will be the initial release of the Financial Invoicing and Reporting Strategic Transition (FIRST) project. The FIRST project is funded by the IT Captial Review Board and seeks to implement major changes to GMAS to support the automated invoicing and reporting for sponsored projects. The project is co-led by the Research Administration Systems team in HUIT along with partners in Research Finance in the Office for Sponsored Programs.

 

Release Details

Details regarding this release have been published in eNews; job aids supporting the new screens and features will be posted to the User Resources section of the GMAS website and to the IT Help Website. To receive the latest GMAS news, subscribe to our blog. Please contact the GMAS help desk (email: contactgmas@harvard.edu) with any questions or requests for assistance.

Segment Research Team/Committed Effort

Some of the enhancements that will be included for the segment research team and committed effort include:

• Addition of a confirm research team button on the segment research team page
  • There will still be the option to confirm the research team from the segment homepage as well
• New functionality to enter and view past, current, and future commitments when confirming or editing the segment research team
• Changed entry of effort to be in person months
• Addition of clarifying text on the segment research team screen that indicates whether the current view is a proposed research team or a confirmed research team
• Addition of confirm research team history on the segment research team screen and in segment activity that shows who confirmed the research team and when
• Effort will now default in at confirm research team from the proposal budget (conversion of percentage entered at proposal to person months at confirming the research team is percent x 12 = person months)
• Restructuring of the confirm research team layout for easier editing and adding of segment level research team members
• Redesign to help promote proper addition of a TBD member to the segment research team
• New functionality to switch a TBD role to a person without having to delete and add
• Addition of a tool-tip on the edit research team member button to indicate that a member cannot be edited if there is a sponsor commitment, and to point to the correct central administrator (the central administrator(s) on the admin team)
• Changed “Sponsor commitment” language for clarity. It will instead be a yes or no question that says “Sponsor approval required to change effort”

See the Confirming a Segment Research Team job aid for more details.

External Organization Homepage Converted

Changes to the screen were as follows:

• Add and Edit screens are now pop-up modals
• Addition of a “Related segments’ panel at the top of the organizations homepage:
  • Provides counts where the organization is a sponsor, prime sponsor, or subagreement on pending, active, closed, and not funded segments
  • Counts are links that open modals that provides the list of segments associated to the count
  • Projects are links if security allows access to that segment, otherwise project will show in the list but will not be accessible
  • The full list of organization affiliations can be exported to an excel spreadsheet

Central Compliance Changes

• Change behavior of equipment flag
  • The sponsor equipment flag will now automatically default to yes when there is the addition or a change to the funding instrument to make it a Contract, or Fixed Price Contract AND the sponsor, prime sponsor, or co-sponsor is a federal organization.
  • Users will have the ability to change the flag to No.
  • Committing a revision where there has been an addition or change to the funding type or sponsors which makes it a federal contract, or a change to the sponsor equipment flag to mark it as yes on a federal contract, it will result in the special equipment term for government titled equipment to be selected on the special equipment screen.
• Simplify rules for fund type defaults (FG/NE/NG)
  • The new rules for how the fund types default are as follows:
    • If the sponsor or prime sponsor is Federal, fund type will default to FG and cannot be changed.
    • If the sponsor and prime sponsor are both Non-federal:
      • If the agency fund flag is set to "Yes", fund type will default to NE and cannot be changed.
      • If the funding instrument is Grant or Fixed price grant, fund type will default to NG, but can be changed to NE or NG
      • If the funding instrument is Contract, Fixed price contract, or Cooperative agreement, fund type will default to NE, but can be changed to NE or NG
      • If there is a co-sponsor on the project, the fund type will default based on the rules above, but will always be editable and allow any of the three values (this is a workaround to account for any exception cases)
  • See the How GMAS Determines Fund Type job aid for more details.
• Change behavior of Plan 294 flag
  • GMAS used to automatically flag Plan 294 based on criteria entered at the segment revision. It was not a data point you could manually change. Since the criteria changes, and there really needs to be a review of whether or not Plan 294 applies, it will now be a yes or no question in the segment revision.
    • The question will appear when there is the addition or change to the project to make it a federal contract (same rules as the equipment flag behavior).
    • The question will be “Small Business Subcontracting Plan?”
• Change the Plan 294 non-financial report to ISR, and add a new non-financial report called SSR in support of the Plan 294 changes

Converted Screens

• External organization
• Confirm research team
• Research team list for segment (includes Add/Edit research team members)
• Subagreement list for requests
• Delete for Initial and Competing Renewal Proposals

Other fixes and improvements

• Turned on signature notifications so that email notifications will be sent to individuals who have required signatures in the Cost Share form for HMS and SPH
• Added the foreign/overseas question to all segment revisions
• Added all recipients to the bottom of all GMAS email notifications to inform recipients of others who were notified
• converted email reminder for sheduled non-financial reports to use newer email format
• Added a disabled state to the <Create subagreement> button in Initial and Competing Renewal Proposals to indicate that subagreements cannot be added to projects if the sponsor type has not been designated yet by the organization editor in OSP
• Fixed GMAS session timeout issue when working in multiple tabs
• Added "Proposal" in front of the word title on the proposal entry screen for clarification purposes

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that was causing error messages when processing subamendments
• Fixed a bug that was causing subagreements to be duplicated on action memos
• Fixed a bug that was causing the filtering for requests due today to display requests due tomorrow
• Fixed a bug where the segment displayed the segment status as "Pending" when it should be "Not funded"
• Fixed a bug where using the back button was causing duplication of school specific questions, resulting in issues with locking and routing

Retirement

• SCR_0649 edit research team
• PI appointment term approval (was partially retired in the May 2017 release)

• Human Subjects Training (was partially retired in the May 2017 release)

• UDO approval

• Responsible conduct of research approval/SCR_0641

Interfaces

• Modified Grants.gov polling, mailcall, and OAR create interfaces to run outside of the gmas application server
• Updated mailcall to fix issues with large attachments

Technical

• Migrated all GMAS servers to Amazon cloud
• Upgraded weblogic to version 12.2.1.2