eRA Project Team Meeting

Date: March 27, 2001

Time: 9:00 am

Location: 6700B Rockledge, Room 1205

Next Meeting: April 10, 2001, 6700B Rockledge, Room 1205 at 9:00 a.m.

Decisions/Action Items:

1. NIH/NSF meeting planning document on e-business is attached (Attachment A).

2. BOG spreadsheet is being provided (Attachment B) to help remind the GA's to develop implementation plans for 2001. GA's are reminded that the FY 2001 budget can carry into meeting the requirements during FY 2002. The money will not all be spent this year.

3. The request to support a special requirement to build a Population and Tracking Module was discussed and approved by the Project Team contingent upon obtaining funding for the requirement. The next steps are to discuss with the Steering Committee (SC) who must approve for submission to the BOG to obtain funding from the IT Investment Fund. Note: eRA does not have a contingency fund, and has established with the approval of the Steering Committee, that individuals or groups requesting projects outside of the normal priority setting process have to finance the project.

4. The Committee Management Module was approved to move to the requirements analysis phase. The group requested an additional layer of detail on the implementation team. Several other items to note:

a. The CM and other functional areas will have a sub site on the eRA homepage.

b. The outreach and communications plan of the CM is a good example of best practices. We will move to have the CM newsletter wrapped within the Inside eRA to have it as a model for other groups to utilize.

c. The CM presentation is provided in Attachments C, D, and E.

5. ECB/QVR/CAM

a. This effort continues to move along with a strong connection with the community. The QVR system will role out into production soon. Support to continue with changes, modifications and enhancements were endorsed. The QVR system should help in providing additional reporting tools for the community to use. Like the release of the summary statement module, the issue of training/user support was discussed. Several items have been discussed to help improve integration with the project and customer service. Here is the list of items some discussed during and some before and after the meeting:

i. Thor and Tim are assigned the task of developing a plan that delineates responsibility and funding to transition user support from being split to a centralized source for ECB/QVR/CAM. Background: Currently user support for these modules is divided. Currently the programmer at NIEHS and Thor have the knowledge of the system and receive the majority of calls. The IMPAC II help desk also receives calls but has not been trained on the system and is not able to offer technical advice.

Announcements:

1. John McGowan reported that the Steering Committee (SC) accepted the one page budget document as the long range-planning document for FY 2002 and FY 2003. The priorities need to be discussed and developed in detail for this fall.

2. Recent changes to the Project Team include: Bud Erickson, Group Advocate for Program Staff; Belinda Seto will be the advocate for Data Quality and also the single point for obtaining requirements and setting priorities for the OER Offices, Pete Morton, CIT Group Advocate; and Steve Hausman, Group Advocate for Scanning.

3. A meeting co-sponsored by NSF and NIH is being planned that will focus on evaluating the future of e-administration/business. What should we be building for? No date has been set yet. The concept paper is provided as Attachment A.

4. Megan Columbus has two people coming in April who can assist the Project Team with meetings and minutes.

5. eRA Planning Process: John McGowan asked Group Advocates to develop an implementation plan for spending over multiple fiscal years. Claire's presentation provides a model for an implementation plan that bridges multiple years. The budget is allocated based on the original priorities. If more money is being requested, a new implementation plan will need to be developed to reflect changing requirements. Fall is the crucial time when there is an opportunity to make corrections. See BOG Budget (Attachment F).

6. The Project Team is encouraged to review the upcoming list of articles (see Attachment G) for Inside eRA for April and May and make suggestions for additional topics which will be of interest to the community.

Status:

1. Jim Cain reported that analysts will be coordinating with the Group Advocates and working up detailed plans in each module area. Once the business areas are developed, specific resources will be mapped to specific project activities.

2. The IRDB bridge is functioning. The manual updates are completed. Nightly loads are finished in approximately two hours.

3. The documents relating to the redesign of the Commons using J2EE architecture have been circulated to the extramural community and the feedback received thus far is very favorable and supportive. It is expected that a recommendation will be made by the end of March.

4. Group Advocates were asked to think about how the eRA website could best support their efforts. Possible items to include for each module might include: Priority list, implementation plan, MS Project for key target dates and/or status buttons to show progress, meeting minutes, etc. In April, Chip will bring in the contractor with a straw-person shell for a discussion on requirements from the group.

Presentations:

1. Claire Benfer gave a presentation on the Committee Management Module (Attachments C, D, E). Committee Management has 3 groups with broad representation: CM User Group, CM Officers Committee and CM JAD. She tracks 22 priorities and issues a monthly newsletter. She will include interfacing with Reports to avoid duplication across modules.

2. Thor Fjellsted presented a demo of the new Query/View/Report (QVR) - Electronic Council Book (ECB) module (see Attachment H). Some enhancements include: including staff version hit lists; saving query; create query to give to council member; creating PDF or .zip saved files. It is expected that Basic QVR will be launched this year. Thor is working with Carol Martin (Reports) to use templates in Excel or other formats. Many institutes capture their own data; need to be able to address that requirement.

Attendees

John McGowan, Claire Benfer, Carlos Caban, Jim Cain, Krishna Collie, Zoe Ann C Sewell, Michael Cox, Thor Fjellstedt, Carla Flora, Scarlett Gibb, Cassandra Gibbs, Andy Greenleaf, Chip Groh, Marcia Hahn, Paul Markovitz, Carol Martin, Bob Moore, Pete Morton, Richard Panniers, Wally Schaffer, Jay Silverman, Bobbi Spitzberg, Jim Tucker, Virginia Van Brunt

Attachments