GMAS Outage in September

GMAS has a upcoming planned outage scheduled for a new release.  The outage will begin at the end of business on September 22^nd beginning at approximately 7pm through end of day September 24^th. The release will include the following enhancements:

Cloud migration for GMAS servers
This will be a seamless transition with no impact to users.

Committed effort/Segment Research Team changes
This has been the main focus of release 1_45. Some of the enhancements that will be included for committed effort include:

• Addition of the confirm research team button on the segment research team page
• Removal of the denominator of effort (all effort will be entered in person months going forward instead of requiring the selection of Calendar, Academic, or Summer and percent or month)
• Ability to enter and view past, current, and future commitments
• Text on the segment research team screen that makes it clear if the view is a proposed research team or a confirmed research team
• Text on the segment research team screen that indicates who committed the research team and when
• Effort defaulting in from the proposal budget when confirming the research team, if it was entered
• Easier editing and adding of segment level research team members at the segment level
• Improvements to make it easier to add a “TBD” member to the team at the segment level
• Ability to switch a “TBD” role to a person without having to delete and add at the segment level
• Clarifying tool-tip on the edit research team member button to indicate that a member cannot be edited if there is a sponsor commitment, and to point the department person to the correct central administrator (the central administrator on the admin team)
• Changing “Sponsor commitment” language for clarity. It will instead be a yes or no question that says “Sponsor approval required to change effort”

Approval retirement

Human Subjects Training (was partially retired with the last release)

UDO

PI Appointment Termination (was partially retired with the last release)

Convert external organization home page
This is mainly a straight convert. There is the addition of a “Related segments” panel at the top of the organizations homepage:

• It will give counts where the organization is a sponsor, prime sponsor, or subagreement on pending, active, closed, and not funded segments.
• The counts will be links that go to a list page where you can see the list of segments.
• If you have security to access the segment, there will be a link to the segment, if you do not have security it will only be viewable in the list.
• There will be a download option where you can export the full list of all organization related segments to excel.

Central compliance changes
Change behavior of equipment flag

• The sponsor equipment flag will now automatically default to yes when there is the addition or a change to the funding instrument to make it a Contract, or Fixed Price Contract AND the sponsor, prime sponsor, or co-sponsor is a federal organization.
• Users will have the ability to change the flag to No.
• Committing a revision where there has been an addition or change to the funding type or sponsors which makes it a federal contract, or a change to the sponsor equipment flag to mark it as yes on a federal contract, it will result in the special equipment term for government titled equipment to be selected on the special equipment screen.

Simplify rules for fund type defaults (FG/NE/NG)
The new rules for how the fund types default are as follows:

• If the sponsor or prime sponsor is Federal, fund type will default to FG and cannot be changed.
• If the sponsor and prime sponsor are both Non-federal:
  • If the agency fund flag is set to "Yes", fund type will default to NE and cannot be changed.
  • If the funding instrument is Grant or Fixed price grant, fund type will default to NG, but can be changed to NE or NG
  • If the funding instrument is Contract, Fixed price contract, or Cooperative agreement, fund type will default to NE, but can be changed to NE or NG
  • If there is a co-sponsor on the project, the fund type will default based on the rules above, but will always be editable and allow any of the three values (this is a workaround to account for any exception cases)

Change behavior of Plan 294 flag

• GMAS used to automatically flag Plan 294 based on criteria entered at the segment revision. It was not a data point you could manually change. Since the criteria changes, and there really needs to be a review of whether or not Plan 294 applies, it will now be a yes or no question in the segment revision.
  • The question will appear when there is the addition or change to the project to make a feferal contract (same rules as the equipment flag behavior).
  • The question will be "IS a Subcontracting Plan needed?"

Please email contactgmas@harvard.edu with any questions.