IMPAC II GM Lead User’s Group
Minutes from February 14, 2001 Meeting

Representative from 18 ICs, OER & ROW were in attendance.

Marcia Hahn updated the group on the status of eRA in general and specifically the FY2001 Priorities. The update included:

• Review of the approved FY2001 priorities
• Administrative changes that had recently-creation of a new Office of Planning, Analysis, & Evaluation for eRA and creation of a new Office of the Federal Commons
• Information on the Commons Advisory Group-a companion group to the eRA Project Management team made up of representatives from grantee organizations
• Mapping Expectations to Reality-although eRA will be receiving all the $34 million requested for FY2001, it will take months to "ramp up" developer staff to accomplish all the initiatives. FY2001 should be viewed as a year to ramp up with the expectation that "roll-out" won't actually happen until FY2002.
• Review of the Priorities that will require Grants Management input or leadership

The majority of the discussion focused on reviewing and prioritizing suggestions for improving and/or enhancing the GM system. Lead Users prioritized using a High/Medium/Low/Not At All scale. The spreadsheet with rankings will be distributed separately. Estimated cost of each suggestion will be determined in a meeting with OER staff and the developers. This will be used as a basis for a FY2002 budget request to the eRA Project Management Team.

A few improvements to the ICO system were also discussed and ranked. These have been forwarded to Sherry Zucker.

Miscellaneous Discussion

• Review of Draft Updated User's Guide-The User's Guide for the GM Application has been updated. This is the first time this document has been updated since 1998 so the revision includes all improvements since then. A handful of Lead Users "volunteered" to review assigned portions of this 150+ page document. Tim Twomey agreed to consolidate comments-due to Tim by Thursday March 1^st.
• IMPAC II Upgrade Reminder-Tim indicated that the migration to Oracle 8i this weekend (February 16 - 19) was on schedule. Users may not be able to access the system until your local technical support folks load the new tools. This migration will also allow users to function using the Windows 2000 operating system.

The March meeting is cancelled. The next regularly scheduled meeting is Wednesday, April 11^th, 9-11:30 a.m. in the Neurosciences Conference Center, Room D. NINDS will be our parking sticker host.