Managing your Grant through the MyResearch Database

Emily Brashear: My name is Emily Brashear. I work in the Office of Research Advancement and Partnerships.

Emily Brashear: Today, we’re going to hear from Katy Roberts. She’s a senior grants and contracts administrator for the Office of Research Support and Operations. This information session’s about managing your grant through the MyResearch database. So she’s going to kind of give us a run through on what faculty and maybe even some admin admin probably know a lot more than what will be taught.

Emily Brashear: But just maybe a refresher, it’s open. This is open to any faculty, student, postdocs, staff, anybody that utilizes the MyResearch database. So we’ll go through that before I turn the time over to her. I just want to thank everybody for coming. And what do you know of a couple more information sessions that are coming up on the 13th.

Emily Brashear: There’s going to be a using Using SciENcv and this is going to be kind of just like an overview. And then there will be a lunch like bring your lunch and we’ll walk through it with you later on. It’s not posted here, but the date is coming after this one. Then we’ll do a Budget and Budget Justification.

Emily Brashear: Amanda Yager will host that at the end of the month. And then mid-March there’s PI Roles and Responsibilities. You can find all of these events at orap.wsu.edu/events if you’re interested in that. And with that, I’m going to turn the time over to Katy, if you’re ready. Yep. Awesome. And one more thing is, any questions in the chats that you may have, I’ll monitor that, or interrupt as needed, raise your hands.

Emily Brashear: And lastly, this will be recorded and sent out to you if you need a refresher later on. Katy, the time is yours.

Katy Roberts: I’ll do a quick snap like introduction of myself. Just thank you, Emily. So my name’s Katy Roberts. I have 13 years here at WSU. I come with some knowledge from SPS, spending four years in space and then seven years in CAHNRS as part of the CAHNRS grants team, a great manager, and a lot of you guys names are very familiar: welcome back

Katy Roberts: And nice to see you. And I hope… And then I’ve spent a year ORSO. So to give you a little bit of background about the grants training and knowledge base. So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen and we’re going to walk through some of the features that MyResearch has to offer to make sure everybody can see my screen.

Katy Roberts: Can everybody see that? MyResearch dashboard? Perfect. I would like to ask for a volunteer, somebody I can use to look up as my dashboard, of course, will be empty because they don’t have any research experience. So is there somebody that would be willing to let us walk through your dashboards?

Katy Roberts: Anybody? We’re not going to go into details, but there will be a few things that can be seen. So I just wanted.

Anand Jayakaran: I would be happy to share mine. Katy, this is Ani Jayakaran.

Katy Roberts: Absolutely. Thank you. It’s if I can spell your…

Anand Jayakaran: Yeah, J-A-Y-A-K-A-R-A-N.

Katy Roberts: I know it’s familiar. I’ve done a lot of your stuff, so. All right. So when you log in, it should be similar view to your dashboard. There will be several sections that you can see. There is a compliance piece and this is where any trainings that needs to be taken would show up. I’m in this case, Ani is all caught up on his. Nice job Ani! And then so they would pop up here and give you a link to the training so that you can take the trainings on the right side.

Katy Roberts: There is pending awards, active awards, other agreements and completed projects. This is kind of a history of your research funding that you’ve received throughout your time here. I know the completed awards only does the last five years. However, the MyResearch database does house all of them if you if we do need to look back further than five years.

Katy Roberts: When you click on the dropdown menus under pending proposals and awards, these are proposals that have been submitted or are waiting to be submitted to the agency and these are after the eREX gets routed and fully approved, they show up on the dashboard, entered into our system, assigned to under a ORSO number. And once they’re submitted to the agency, they will stay under pending proposals until we receive a denial notice or we receive a funding notice.

Katy Roberts: And the award has been fully set up by SPS. So you will notice there’s a red warnings on these: “Award has been received but account information has not yet been entered into MyResearch”. So all these ones are it’s a warning, you’ll see. And that means that we’ve transitioned. This one’s a little older, so I’m kind of wondering why that warning’s on there.

Katy Roberts: But in general, this will be all your pending projects that are waiting to be funded. Under active projects:

Katy Roberts: These will be… [Emily Brashear: Real quick Katy?]

Katy Roberts: sure

Emily Brashear: If they find an issue or some discrepancy with the pending proposals, do they reach out to their research administrator first or go to ORSO right away?

Katy Roberts: So I would suggest always contact your grant administrator as the first step that oftentimes they’ll have some additional knowledge. However, if they are unsure, then please feel free to reach out to our main ORSO inbox at orso@wsu.edu. We are happy to look into what is going on with these and why they are showing up in this case incorrectly.

Emily Brashear: Okay, thanks.

Katy Roberts: Yeah. Oftentimes it’s something that’s not checked in the logs or something that’s pending that we haven’t finished yet, so please don’t hesitate to reach out. Great question.

Katy Roberts: Any others before we keep going?

Anand Jayakaran: I did learn today that my grant administrator needed to be told and I should have done that, but I wanted to tell them that a grant that a couple of days ago was showing up as pending had we actually got a decision on it. And so I had to let them know that that grant was denied. And so then they pushed that up the chain to ORSO.

Anand Jayakaran: So that was something I haven’t… I hadn’t done before. And the first time in eight years at WSU I realized, “Oh, that’s how it goes.”

Katy Roberts: So yeah, we and unless we’re copied in, ORSOs automatically copied in on those responses, we wouldn’t know to update the record for you. So that is, that is a great learning opportunity. So if you guys would like your records updated, please please make sure you forward any notices, either funding or denials too, ORSO and we can get those logged for you.

Katy Roberts: Thank you. Any other’s? All right, so in this… So under active projects, these are all the projects that have been set up in Workday. So they will become active when they get the AWD number and this is the… a tag that ties them to the account in Workday. Some nice things about these ones is you do have a link, an ORSO… to the ORSO number.

Katy Roberts: And when you click on this one and of course it’s going to flip my screen, you guys still see That’s good. Hopefully. So in here this is the ORSO log. how long? And that’s a good question How long does it take to get an AWD number? So SPS is usually fairly quick, I know they’ve been trying to keep a two week turnover or turnaround time and so there is a bunch of steps that have to happen before your grant.

Katy Roberts: From the time your grant is awarded to the time it is set up in MyResearch. ORSO has a bunch of new awards that come in and we try to maintain a two week turnaround time on award negotiations. That means once we get it, within two weeks, we try to reach out to the agency either with a signed agreement or requested revisions, and then there’s a negotiation process.

Katy Roberts: We try to complete that in a timely manner. Of course, our proposal deadlines drive that a little bit. When we get heavy deadlines, that has to be a priority over awards. But we do try to maintain the two week turnaround time. And then from there we pass it on to SPS and SPS has their turnaround time, which is two weeks as well, to try and get it into work day.

Katy Roberts: I know they’ve been doing really well at trying to make sure they are on top of those and setting them up. I’ve seen some in as quickly as five days, so they are trying to maintain the set up time. If you do have a question about yours, please reach out to your grant administrator and they can give you a status update.

Katy Roberts: And I’ll also show you how to see a status update on how things are going here in just a minute. Did that answer your question?

Dene Gregar: Yes, And I… this… the negotiations negotiations are done and we’re already spending money, which is why I wanted to start tracking this in Workday.

Katy Roberts: Okay. Well, I can definitely look that up for you if you want to wait after the training.

Dene Gregar: I’ll just talk to Diane. I’m on the Vancouver campus. I’ll just talked to Diane Rathbun about it. But thank you.

Katy Roberts: Perfect. All right, so this is what a work log looks like. So once you click on the ORSO number it’s going to put you over to the screen. And this is just the general… It gives you some general information, the ORSO number, the PI, the agency. And in this one, it’s a new award and it is funded, which means that we’ve sent it over to SPS and it has been established in the system and how much it’s worth.

Katy Roberts: And then we try to put the sponsor number and then, of course, the link to the Workday account. If you click on details, details will take you to a log. This is the log of activities and this is where we put all of our communication back and forth between departments and the agency and your eREXs. This is also where your eREXs are logged.

Katy Roberts: So it starts out usually by an eREX. Sometimes we get an award notice and that’s our first log. So you’ll see that this is the eREX. And we do have images that you can open and view what was submitted and then you can see the conversation. So we do try to add notes and of course the scene negotiated.

Katy Roberts: So this is where we submitted the proposal to the agency, our response from the agency. And then, of course, you can see the back and forth to the department and to the agency and from the agency to get the fully executed agreements. And then this green line, which it’ll always be green if it is present, is To SPS.

Katy Roberts: And this is where we send it over to our post-award office to be set up in the system. And this one was sent on 11/30 and by December 4th we had the account set up in the system. So they are keeping, like I said, a fairly decent turnaround time and we do our best to make sure that we get these logged and over to SPS quickly as possible.

Katy Roberts: Each one of these that has images you are welcome to see. We all have extra buttons over here. You guys won’t have access to just because I have edit permissions but you guys should be able to see the images in the logs if you guys are interested. We log emails so the To and From so you can see the communication that was sent with anything that went back and forth.

Katy Roberts: So the database does house a lot of information. It does take a little bit of time getting used to. So please feel free to go in and navigate through and explore. You can’t break anything, so if you are clicking through, it will give you a warning or not load if it’s something you can’t have access to. But in the most part we do try to have some transparency in our…

Katy Roberts: Our workload.

Katy Roberts: We’ll go back to the dashboard. So from that was just by clicking the ORSO number. There is an expenditure info view and of course it’s going to link you right into Workday. I’m not signed into Workday, so it’s not going to give you that, but it should take you right to your account information. Actually, it did log me right in.

Katy Roberts: So this is where you’ll be able to see your award in Workday and see the basic details of your award setup. This one is a post-award… more post-award related. So I’m not going to go too far into this that this will have all your details that were set up by SPS. So

Shelley Pressley: Where did you how did you get to the expenditures? I missed that.

Katy Roberts: I just went to the expenditure info. Okay, So right off your dashboard, it’s a fairly new link and it will not show the expenditures. We’re still working on updating that since Workday is still… we’re trying to connect it to MyResearch between Workday and MyResearch. We can link you to the award, but we however, can’t link you to the budget.

Katy Roberts: Like the Budget actuals report itself. That is a report that has to be run by somebody in Workday. So we can’t link directly to our report, but it will give you the award information. We should probably retitle that, which I will make a note for ORSO to retitle instead of “Expenditure Info”. Just say “Award Information” maybe.

Katy Roberts: So…

Katy Roberts: But it does link in, so it’ll give you access to Workday. And so in this case, these awards should all be present in Workday. They should all be fully set up if you go under other agreements. These are things that you’re going to see, like material transfer agreements, non-disclosure agreements, any subcontracts you might have and things like that that come in.

Katy Roberts: So if they don’t fit within an actual sponsored project, they’re going to be shown underneath under this other agreement section, you’ll notice that our subcontract numbers are changing a little. We’ve gone from our old G numbers, which is our old AIS system, into an SPC system.

Katy Roberts: I’m not going to go into the details of all of these ones, but our historical numbers for subcontracts, like I said, they can be a G number, an SPC number, and our new ones are WSU and then some numbers. So our naming convention has changed a little bit over time. We are adapting with the changes being made within Workday, so you’ll start seeing WSU zero zero and then a number for subcontracts.

Emily Brashear: So I have a quick question for you. In… Under Active Project, you can see the ditch maintenance, the 138952 and then there’s also the other agreements under ditch maintenance 1394. So typically will you see if you have a project open and it does have an NDA or something it will generally fall below as well?

Katy Roberts: Correct. Yet there will be a line for both. And and in this case, the one up top is your original award, your full award. And then these ones down here are the subcontracts that have been issued underneath that award.

Emily Brashear: and I can see there’s two others. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Cool.

Katy Roberts: So like I said, these are all links and these do the same thing. When you click on the ORSO numbers, it’ll flip you to another screen that has the same logs for the subcontracts or NDAs. You can see… You’ll see a lot of different initials. By the way, these initials here tell you who and also is working on your stuff.

Katy Roberts: Mine is KR. We have Troy Bonnie, which is TDB. We have Anke Moore. Arianna is AA, I believe. So we have different people, but the initials will kind of give you a heads up of who is working on your stuff in the database. So if you are…if we’re working on your stuff, feel free to reach out to us.

Katy Roberts: There is a list of all of us on our website, so please feel free to look that up if you would like. But that’s kind of a key indicator of: we do have somebody assigned and they are working on your stuff. Again, this one’s been sent to SPS, has a To account. The image of the To account should give you…

Katy Roberts: Hopefully you can still see the can you guys see the PDF?

Shelley Pressley: It’s very very small.

Katy Roberts: That any better?

Katy Roberts: So it’ll give you a pdf of what SPS did to set things up. This is where you’ll find your G number. Oftentimes your… This is an old one, but you’ll find your grant worktag as well here. So a GR number not on this one. Obviously this one’s are old AIS system, but these images are where you’ll get additional details on account setup information.

Katy Roberts: So your award number, your GR numbers, all those things.

Katy Roberts: Completed: once your termed… The project has been termed and closed out and they’ll move down into the completed projects. And in here you’ll notice we just have a link to the ORSO. But we don’t have any expenditure detail or award detail from Workday because the award will be marked inactive in Workday and.

Katy Roberts: And Ani’s very busy! [laughing] Yeah, very busy though we like to see these and we love seeing and working on your guys’ and stuff. So keep doing what you’re doing is incredibly important and we do value what’s going on with your, you know, your research. So please let us know if there is something additional we can do to help you and support you.

Katy Roberts: We are happy to do so here at ORSO. And ORAP.

Emily Brashear: I just want to point out that if you are new and filling out your current and pending or something, this is a good resource to use because you can see your active projects and your your completed projects, if or I should say, that would do so much. But anyway, you get what I’m saying is you can, you can help use this information to help fill that out and not miss any if you have a lot going on.

Katy Roberts: That’s a great, great, great piece of information that is true. And and I know it’s an easy way for to assist your grant admin and for you guys to kind of get a bird’s eye view of what’s going on with your staff. So great source of information.

Katy Roberts: And there are some proposal developmental tools that are available from the from the database. You should have a proposal development tab that appears up at the top next to Grants.

Katy Roberts: And this proposal development toolbox will link you into some resources that we have or some links to our ORAP office and some additional and ORSO budget guidelines and our budget workbook and some workshops that are coming up and some training, a training resource. So we do have some resources to help with proposal development that are built into here as well as a current and pending generator.

Katy Roberts: I haven’t used this for a while, but you could go in here and it should help you generate your current pending information by pulling off of your records.

Katy Roberts: There’s training and compliance pieces in here. If, if you guys are set up as the right access, I apologize. My access to view is a bit different though I am not quite sure what all your guys’s access has. I’m You could also capture publications funded by grants. That is something we could definitely look into as a possibility in the future.

Katy Roberts: Like I said, don’t hesitate to explore. I’m looking to open up attachments. You cannot break things in MyResearch. So the access to edits is not available so you guys can view and and follow along. And the nice thing is, is those logs are updated regularly. I know that I am constantly logging all my interactions in those. So it’ll give you an idea if we’ve asked the agency for more information or if we’re waiting for the department to respond to a request for information.

Katy Roberts: So it’ll kind of give you guys an update on where things are at and kind of give you a little bit more transparency on what our offices do.

Emily Brashear: So one of the other things that people will contact, the Office of Research Advancement and Partnerships for is to find out like, who has applied for this grant in the past? And this is where we go to look for those grants. If somebody has applied or who has awarded them and so this database houses a whole lot of information.

Emily Brashear: It’s like the holy grail of WSU. If this goes down, we’re all done. But now it’s quite the the system that we have going.

Katy Roberts: Yeah, I was gonna say it’s a fantastic database. It does take a little bit of time playing in it and getting familiar with the features and what’s available and how to find things. But we’re happy to continue to provide some additional guidance if needed or answer any additional questions. And please feel free to reach out on Teams or definitely, like I said, our ORSO email and we’re, we’re happy to look into things for you.

Katy Roberts: So we want to make sure that this is productive and effective for you guys to help manage your grants.