SPA Realignment Announcement

As many of you know, SPA has spent several months working on our reorganizational plans. I'm delighted to let you know that those arrangements have now been completed, and we are blending them into the organizational changes necessary to implement EFS. This new model will:

• Significantly enhance the relationships between SPA staff and units we serve;
• Create greater efficiencies in our business processes;
• Promote a strong, positive working environment for SPA staff.

Effective July 1, 2008, SPA will become a constituency-based organization, meaning your unit will have an assigned primary Grants Administrator who will handle all of your sponsored projects proposals, awards, and subawards (regardless of sponsor) except for projects from business & industry sponsors, and from the State of Minnesota. Business and industry and State-sponsored agreements will be served by other designated grants administrators who specialize in those areas. Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs), Confidential Disclosure Agreements (CDAs), and $0 Collaboration Agreements will continue to be handled by Duane Oyen and his staff.

Other changes include the following:

• SPA will be organized into five constituency-based teams (each serving a set of colleges or major academic units).Each of these teams will be led by a Principal Grants Administrator (PGA) who reports to an associate director or senior associate director. The PGA, a new role in SPA, will coordinate backup, assist with difficult transactions, help with staff training, and promote common procedures and practice. Please join me in congratulating Lorrie Awoyinka, Jason Jacobs, Amy Rollinger (Goerger), April Coon, and Laura Williams who have been selected to serve in these important roles!

• SPA and SFR have created a joint team that will focus on effective award setup in the Enterprise Financial System (EFS). This team will be led by Karen Sachi, Principal Grants Administrator, and Mary Gorder, EFS Analyst. Except for two full-time EFS specialists now being hired, the team is made up of individuals withinthe two offices who will dedicate a portion of their time to this effort. The work being done on this team will promote high-quality and timely data entry while relieving each staff member inSPA and SFR from having to be a specialist on every aspect of the new system.

• Kevin McKoskey will hold the title of Senior Associate Director, and Judy Krzyzek, Associate Director. Ed Wink, AVP Emeritus, is graciously continuing to help out while SPA recruits its remaining associate director.

• Some SPA staff are relocating within our office to be co-located with the remaining members of their team. Phone numbers will not be changing.

The makeup of each team and their college or major academic unit assignments were made following a detailed workload assessment. Considerations included obvious synergies across colleges, transactional volume, the breadth of agency knowledge among staff, and the variety and complexity of transactions. Where possible, the degree of change was mitigated by assigning knowledgeable staff to departments or other units they have worked with successfully in the past. All SPA grants administrators are receiving cross-training in the breadth of agencies with which we work.  This specialty training started in June and is expected to run into the first part of August.

Unit heads will be provided with the names of their new grant administrators, and this information can also be found on our realignment web site at:  http://www.ospa.umn.edu/announcements/realignment.htm 

Specific links of interest include:

• SPA’s new organizational chart
• List of departmental/unit assignments(a searchable version of this document will be posted in July)
• SPA staff locations and phone numbers (phone numbers are not changing)
  

Please feel free to begin contacting your newly-assigned grants administrator for proposals and awards that are expected to arrive in SPA on or after July 1st. In the next several weeks a grants administrator who began work on a transaction may finish it before handing over the project to the new administrator; however, we suggest you use your newly-assigned grant administrator as your primary point of contact.


If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at 4-1648 or via email at pwebb@umn.edu.  We will be evaluating this new model in late FY09 and hope to learn from all of you at that time that it has proven beneficial to our shared objective of effective research administration.

Pamela