I thank the more than 200 of you who participated in the follow-up survey about Collaborative Grant Services (CGS) and Office of Sponsored Projects Administration (OSPA) operations. Your constructive feedback is an essential component of our efforts to better support our research community with the services offered by CGS and OSPA in submitting and managing sponsored projects. We received positive feedback on the changes implemented so far, but it is clear there is room for continued improvement.
The areas identified as ongoing challenges were:
- Communication between CGS and OSPA staff
- Communication and responsiveness to PI requests
- Delays in processing account setup and budget modifications
- Training of staff and decision making
We are committed to addressing these issues. Actions taken or underway since the survey include:
- Ongoing implementation of a tracking-ticketing system to improve communication and accountability between CGS, OSPA, and PI
- Increased staffing focused on account setup and roll-out of a new contracts system to streamline OSPA processes
- Re-organization of the Hubs to better serve PIs across all types of proposal submissions and balance workload for CGS staff
If you have not already, please visit the new site for Sponsored Project Services, with the project lifecycle summed up in 7 steps. Again, thank you for your candid feedback and I look forward to continuing efforts to improve services over the project lifecycle.
