News

July 24, 2015 - Roy W. Mollenkamp

The Sponsored Projects Office will be transitioning to the Click ERA database management system over the course of the next few months.  So, how will this affect you?

The Rollout

First, we at the Sponsored Projects Office would like to emphasize that we are completing this rollout in a gradual, department-by-department fashion which should allow everyone to become fully comfortable with it prior to becoming reliant on it.  Rolling the system out slowly will also allow us to provide some in-depth assistance to anyone and everyone who may desire it.  Additionally, with an in-house developer, feedback can be swiftly adapted to and provide for a very fluid and polymorphic system -- we will be eagerly seeking your feedback on what parts of the system you like, as well as what parts you feel could be more intuitive -- Let us know and we will change anything we can to make for a better user experience.

What To Expect

From now through October, you likely will not even notice any change in your day-to-day routine, however we will already be fully-immersed in the transition.  This will be our "beta-testing" period so-to-speak, where our Pre-Award staff will be using the Click system to keep track of the proposals you submit; however the process for Principal Investigators and their proposal staff will remain almost entirely unchanged: You will still be submitting proposals the way you always have in the past (i.e. paper forms e-mailed directly to your Sponsored Projects Officer).  The only difference will be that the Pre-Award / SPO staff will be using the system to enter the information in an effort to discover any bugs before rolling out the system to departments; Department approvers will also be "approving" the proposals you submit via the Click ERA system.  You will also begin to receive notifications when SPO takes actions that affect your project.

Once this initial phase is complete, we will begin rolling out the full system to individual departments.  We will only be opening the system to a handful of departments each month in an effort to ensure that we can fully train each department on how the system works -- when your department's phase-in month arrives, after completing some in-depth training courses on how to use the system, you will begin entering all of your proposals directly into the Click system.  By this point, you should be thoroughly familiar with the system, however if you are not 100% confident, we will continue to offer training and assistance by any means necessary.

The Benefits

We believe that this new system will provide a host of wonderful benefits to the HSC community:

• Do you submit multiple proposals that are all similar in content?  Do you ever wish you could just copy that information over to a new proposal and edit only the areas that are different?
  • With the Click system -- You can!
• Have you ever wanted to find out the status of your proposal, but didn't have time to track down your Sponsored Projects Officer?
  • Simply login to your Click account and you can instantly see where your proposal is in the process
• Have you ever wanted direct access to your department awards/submissions?
  
  • With Click ERA you can access department reports at your convenience
• No more Proposal Data Sheets!
• User Intuitive

Stay tuned for more information on this important change to the proposal submission process...