ORA is committed to transparency and believes that information about our metrics can be beneficial to the community. While dashboards are under development that will provide some of this information on demand, ORA will send out monthly metrics. These metrics may expand and change over time and your feedback is welcomed as it will help inform the development of the dashboards. ORA is currently providing the following metrics:

Proposals

We provide the total number of proposals submitted and the percent of proposals submitted on time. Sponsors rely on UM to complete a thorough review and to ensure all compliance concerns have been addressed. Submitting to ORA timely is critical to be able to complete these reviews. Additionally, ORA wants to ensure that faculty who submit early receive a timely review with time to make corrections before the final submission.     

Contracts (excluding clinical trials)

These metrics track the amount of time from when ORA receives the contract to when it is fully executed. While ORA’s turnaround times heavily impact the overall timelines, we are only one piece of this complex puzzle. Other factors include internal reviews by other UM offices, sponsor review and wait time and obtaining signatures. However, these metrics can give you an idea of current overall processing times. Some other things to keep in mind:

• There are two types of outgoing subawards, FDP template and long form. The FDP template is a template that many institutions have agreed to use for federal funding. They tend to move a lot faster because they are just that, a template! Agreements that are unable to use this template may take longer as the terms may have to be negotiated. 
• ORA is currently experiencing delays in processing times for confidentiality agreements, material transfer agreements and data use agreements. We are helping to cover another office that has a vacancy, and the increased work has resulted in some delays. We are working hard to keep up and hope that the vacancy will be filled soon!

The current award setup metrics look at the timeline from when Post-Award receives the award to when the account is created. While most of the award setup time occurs in Post-Award, I think we can all agree that a better metric would be the time ORA receives the award to account creation. Next fiscal year we have a number of initiatives planned including evaluating and improving the end-to-end award setup process and developing an integration between IBIS and Workday which will reduce data entry.

For now, we will continue to provide metrics on the number of awards setup, amendments, adjustments and corrections processed in addition to the average Post-Award setup time.

Please join me on Wednesday, February 16^th at 12:00 p.m. to discuss this topic further, I would love to hear from you!

Register in advance for the Zoom session here. You may also submit your question(s) and/or comment(s) in advance of the session.