Written by Justo Torres.
As we prepare to bid farewell to Chancellor Randy Woodson, we would like to join the university in Celebrating Transformation and reflect on the positive changes that have taken place in the Office of Contracts and Grants during his tenure.
During the Chancellor’s tenure, externally-funded research and other sponsored projects have thrived. Indeed, Chancellor Woodson took the reins of an organization reporting $360 million in research and development expenditures in 2010 and oversaw the transformation to a top-tier research institution that reported over $630 million in research and development expenditures in 2023.
Sustaining that level of research growth is not possible without identifying and implementing administrative changes to Contracts and Grants processes.
Process Improvements
As recently as 2015, Contracts and Grants relied on fiscal managers to set up projects, with full budgets and a complete set of data attributes, as well as manage the daily fiscal needs of those projects. Needless to say, with over 4,000 active projects at any point in time, this was not sustainable and would create a massive backlog of actions in the system. Moreover, this process relied on paper moving from Sponsored Programs and Regulator Compliance Services (SPARCS) to Contracts and Grants. Paper is wasteful, expensive to print and space-intensive to store.
Since those days, the process in Contracts and Grants has transformed. Today, Contracts and Grants relies on a team of three dedicated fiscal assistants to manage the entry and management of project data in PeopleSoft. Gone are the days of paper. Awards reach Contracts and Grants in nightly data batches, and documents are stored and accessed through the Research Enterprise Data System (RED). Despite increased volume, projects are created or updated in days rather than months. In fact, same-business-day turnaround, which was unheard of just 10 years ago, is not at all uncommon today.
Rethinking Web Pages and the Information They Hold
Managing a contract or grant at any university is a life-cycle based process with many different offices playing a role. Web pages play a critical role in getting our research community the answers they need. Individuals accessing the siloed, office-based web pages of the past needed more information than they usually had to get to the correct answers.
Contracts and Grants again partnered with SPARCS to change that. Rather than individual web pages, with their information gaps and overlaps, SPARCS and Contracts and Grants developed and implemented a single, life-cycle-based web presence. Today, users can navigate seamlessly through the web presence of multiple offices charged with different processes in research administration without realizing the change. They can identify the correct points of contact for any process without first having to know what each office is responsible for. As long as they know “what” they need, our shared web page will get them to “how” and “who”.
The Contracts and Grants team has continually sought ways to better serve the university community. As we develop new ideas and improve best practices, our team’s transformations reflect NC State’s commitment to progress and innovation, a cornerstone of Chancellor Woodson’s leadership.