The NGMA training lunch at which Dominic Sale, the OMB GMLOB Portfolio Manager, was scheduled to speak has been canceled. Apparently things are so hectic at OMB that it's proven impossible to schedule any appropriate time.
The next NGMA lunch will be on June 24th, when Elizabeth Russell will present “Become a More Effective Speaker: How to Tell Your Story with Confidence & Get Results”. See you there!
The agenda for the NGP's June 9th meeting has been announced. Register at , and join us at 1.30pm at the Department of Education at 550 12th Street SW, Washington, DC, or via webcast at http://tcg.acrobat.com/thengp.
If you were planning on attending the NGMA training luncheon tomorrow, featuring Dominic Sale of OMB talking about "The Use of Technology in Managing Grants: Guidance and Direction - Recovery.gov and GMLOB", then you can stop right now because it's being rescheduled. The new date is TBA; we'll post it here when we know. And keep an eye on the Grants Management Events Calendar for all the dates of upcoming meetings, lunches, and training that you'll want to attend.
Last week the GAO released a report (GAO-09-590R) on the status of Grants.gov, in response to enquiries from Congressmen Voinovich, Towns, Lynch, and Davis. The report echoes many of the concerns expressed by OMB several weeks ago but GAO goes a few steps forward with regard to concerns about confusing grant deadlines, with these recommendations (as stated by FCW):
Later this week, I hope to post some thoughts about where Grants.gov should go in the future, as sticking with the current system and situation is untenable.
Last week I gave the presentation below at the Compusearch PRISM Educational Conference. On the panel with me were Katie Hermosilla (Booz Allen Hamilton) and Chae Shim and Tracy Mosson (Compusearch). Katie talked about the policy side of the grants management world and I summarized the systems side, at a very high level. It was a very interesting discussion, with some great questions from the audience, so I thought others may be interested.
Federal Grants Management Systems Landscape, April 30, 2009
Monday was the deadline for a large grant opportunity, and Grants.gov performed very well! Whatever measures the team has taken seems to have really helped. As one submitter from a university wrote on the Grants.gov system-to-system mailing list:
"Like most folks, we went into yesterday's Challenge grant deadline with a lot of trepidation. We don't know what all the techical team at Grants.gov changed in the last build. But what a difference that build made! ... We appreciate all the hard work by the Grants.gov team that made this possible."
This was met with applause from others, too. Kudos to the Grants.gov team!
Grants.gov has determined (through a very rigorous process) that only General Dynamics IT, their current contractor, can help them through this frantic period of activity and meet the goals of the Recovery Act, and has awarded them a contract extension, as this announcement shows. One of the announcement attachments is a "Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition", which is a standard analysis that procurement offices produce to justify why "Only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements." The announcement reads, in part:
"The technological augmentation of Grants.gov shall be limited to strengthening Grants.gov community applicant and Agency log-on, registration and application processing. The technology augmentation solution (solution) must be developed and implemented to ensure integration into the existing Grants.gov infrastructure.
"The Contractor shall supply the expertise, labor, equipment, and services necessary to implement the augmentation and continued day-to-day operations, maintenance, and support of Grants.gov. This includes file servers, storage devices, load balancing and network equipment, additional cage space, racks and hosting services (power, connectivity, monitoring)."
It also states:
"The current System Integrator, GDIT designed and operates the Grants.gov system and is the only entity with the in-depth knowledge of the current system. GDIT is also currently the only company that is familiar with the deficiencies of the current design and is best able to engineer and solution taking into account all relevant information concerning the system.
"It could take another contractor as much as 60-90 days to learn the basic architecture, design, and coding of the system and then additional time to design and implement a technical solution, which presents a high level of risk in being able to successfully meet OMB instructions to immediately improve the system and a substantial duplication of costs."
I don't think anyone who knows anything about Grants.gov could reasonably argue with this statement.
There is also a statement about some market research that was conducted:
"Market research was conducted to determine if any alternative options were available to develop and implement a cost-effective solution in the required time frame of the OMB memorandum to support Recovery Act processing. Grants.gov Program Management Office (PMO) and Health and Human Services (HHS) staff investigated the possibility of using a small business service provider that could be contracted with in order to determine the feasibility of having another source perform this work. It was determined that although other solution providers could eventually learn the system and do the requested work many of these firms did not have the in-house expertise and requisite skills to do all of the work and thus would have to subcontract for other services and that the time frames to obtain the resources, go through the steep learning curve and then design the solution would exceed the time available to improve the system, providing a high level of risk in successfully implementing a timely and cost-effective solution. This time frame also did not accommodate the amount of time it would take to solicit and contract for the services, which would also increase the potential time for a solution implementation. Also considered was contracting with a larger company to obtain these services, but the acquisition and learning curve times, along with the associated costs, would still be a factor and thus make this option a high level of risk in successfully implementing a timely and cost-effective solution. All of these options will also result in a substantial duplication of costs. Based on the above, GDIT is the only source available to perform the work without substantial duplication of costs to the government and without unacceptable delays in fulfilling the agency's requirement."
I think this was inevitable, given the state of things. What is surprising, though, is that the Grants.gov PMO has investigated alternatives. Certainly there was a "cloud computing" RFI last year but I don't recall seeing anything along the lines described above.
Regardless, I hope the measures that GDIT is being contracted to take will get Grants.gov through this frantic period and position the platform for future significant improvements that address "the deficiencies of the current design," as they're termed in the announcement.
Jason Miller of FederalNewsRadio has more details about the memo OMB released yesterday (with some quotes from OMB's Tom Gavin, yours truly, and Mark Ace of Cayuse). Text story, audio story. Apparently OMB expects four agencies - Education, DHS, Justice, and DOD - to stop using Grants.gov in the short-term, alleviating the load on Grants.gov by around 50,000 applications.
OMB released a new memo last night, directing agencies to provide past-due and new funds to support the improvement of Grants.gov. Attachment A of the memo shows that OMB expects agencies to send over $12 million to Grants.gov by April 13th, $6 million of which are intended for system improvements.
This memo and the significant level of funding demonstrate that OMB clearly expects agencies to continue using Grants.gov over the long-term.
While this is welcome news from a grants streamlining perspective, agencies are unlikely to be happy about this mandate, especially given Grants.gov's past performance problems (which OMB highlighted in another memo on March 9th).
In many ways, Grants.gov is a victim of its own success, and also of a poorly structured approach to its funding. The "round-robin", pass-the-hat funding approach requires agencies to argue with Congress about the importance of Grants.gov to their own core missions, so that appropriators allow them to hand money to Grants.gov. This results in an unsteady stream of funding - a situation that makes managing a project of any size difficult. The complexity of Grants.gov's mission and approach exacerbates things further.
So this memo is encouraging for grants streamlining advocates, annoying for agencies, and doesn't solve the fundamental problems of how Grants.gov is funded. But at least there seems to be a recognition of this now, and the system will be better positioned to serve the needs of the Recovery Act and future grants activities.
The next Grants.gov webcast will be on April 15 at 1pm EDT. No registration is required. Just click here at 1pm on April 15th! Here's the agenda:
