IMPAC II GM Lead User’s Group
Minutes from January 10, 2001 Meeting

Representative from 19 ICs & ROW were in attendance.

Meeting Location for FY2001

Meetings rooms have been book in the Neuroscience Center (NSC) for all of calendar year 2001. Some are in the conference facility, others are in a conference room in NIMH. The escalating problem of booking central conference rooms was discussed. The contractor responsible for all centralized bookings of NIH Conference facilities is NIH Events Management. Beginning 1/1/2001, they are requiring a CAN number to even book a room because of a new cancellation policy. Groups will be charged the cost of the room if they cancel within 2 weeks prior to the scheduled meeting. And as of 10/1/2001, there will be charge to even book rooms. Clearly this is a global issue for all trans-NIH committees/groups, needing discussion at a level above the user group. Action Item: Lead Users were asked to e-mail Marcia Hahn if they have an Institute conference room large enough to accommodate this group. This would give us some back up options if we have to pull out of the centralized conference rooms.

Parking issue: Thanks to the efforts of lead user Mary Graham, the three ICs that are residents of the NSC (NIMH, NINDS, NIDA) have agreed to help provide parking stickers for those that need to drive. In addition, parking in the adjacent shopping center is available in a designated area. The area is bordered by yellow poles and the sign reads "North Bethesda Parking Permit Holders Only". NIH employees must have a NIH parking permit hanger.

The list of scheduled meetings for CY 2001 is as follows:

FY 2001 eRA Priorities

Marcia Hahn updated the group on the status of the FY2001 Priorities. At the eRA Project Team meeting earlier this week, Dr. McGowan indicated that approval for full funding was very likely. The main message from here though is one of caution and the need to set realistic expectations. During the last year developer staff has been maintained at a minimal level. It will take several months to ramp up developer staff to fully handle all the FY01 priorities. As a result it will be a while before it appears progress is being made. So those individuals that have expressed interest in helping with the development of various initiatives should be patient. Also, there are still opportunities for folks to become involved. There are potentially 5 initiatives that could benefit from having Grants Management involvement. They are:1) Closeout Module-designing an IMPAC II extension of the GM system to handle monitoring of closeout documents, including reports, and possibly links to systems such as FSR & Edison; 2) FSR system-designing a system to replace the existing one and one that would interface with IMPAC II; 3) Co-funding-explore the possibility of co-funding ICs being able to enter their own budget data; 4) T-5 Notification & Status system-primarily to replace the current manual process handled by OER staff this will also need to interface with IMPAC II; and 5) Implementing E-SNAP/Scanned documents in IMPAC II. So far most of the interest has been in the Closeout Module. Action Item: Anyone interested in helping with the development of any of these initiatives should e-mail Marcia Hahn.

The rest of the discussion focused on suggestions for improving and/or enhancing the GM system. Targeted for a life-cycle redesign in FY2002, the budgeting process for that year will be taking place in February & March of this year. All the ideas put forward to date will be incorporated into one list. Lead Users will then have the opportunity to review & prioritize these before the February meeting. Action Item: In the next few weeks Lead Users are encouraged to continue gathering ideas from their colleagues. These should be e-mailed to Marcia Hahn by February 1^st.

Human Subjects Bug: With the recent changes in the coding structure for human subjects another bug has been uncovered. At least one IC indicated that when trying to change a code from 98 to 10, if an award isn't processed the same day, the code was changed back to 98 overnight. It was suggested that the user contact the IMPAC II Helpdesk the next time this is about to occur so that ROW staff can monitor. This brought about general discussion about those mechanisms where a 98 is the appropriate code. Evidently Tim & Chip are collecting a list of activity codes. Action Item: Lead Users should e-mail Tim/Chip if their IC has any unique activity codes where "98" is truly the appropriate code.

Lead Users IC Role: A lead user asked how many ICs channel problems through the lead user vs. having each user contact the Helpdesk directly. Most of the ICs indicated that the majority of issues are channeled through the lead user first. However, they recognized this is not 100%. A number of users prefer to go directly to the Helpdesk. The benefit of coordinating things through one person is that in most cases, an issue has been seen before so a solution is known without involving the Helpdesk. All agreed that at times this is a time consuming activity. As a spin-off discussion, it was asked whether leads should go directly to Tim or Chip rather than the Helpdesk. The benefit of using the Helpdesk is that ROW Sciences maintains a list of all reported bugs/problems. Reported issues are properly documented and appropriate staff assigned to evaluate and resolve the problems. Some leads indicated they use a combination of Helpdesk & OER staff.

Missing T-5 Segments: One IC indicated that for FY2001 an unusual number of T-5 segments were not created. Other ICs indicated only sporadic problems. Recently posted on the "Desktop" of the GMInfonet is an updated list of OER contacts for this issue as well as many other data integrity issues handled by OER staff. The list can be found at: http://odoerdb2.od.nih.gov/gmac/desktop/opera_sqaib_contacts.html.

Next Scheduled Meeting

Wednesday, February 14^th, 9-11:30 a.m. in the NIMH Conference Room 8120.