Behind the Curtain at TCG

AGA Call for Volunteers: Candidate Assessment Tool for Grants Managers

The Association of Government Accountants  (AGA) is launching a new project to help identify accomplished grants managers. AGA just issued a call for volunteers to develop a “Candidate Assessment Tool” for use by managers at all levels of government in screening candidates for grants management jobs. To view the call for volunteers, click here. For more information or if you are interested in participating please contact AGA's Director of Intergovernmental Relations Helena Sims at hsims@agacgfm.org by July 18, 2011.

GPA Announces 13th Annual Conference and Expo

The Grants Professionals Association (GPA) has announced that the 13th Annual GPA Conference & Expo and CharityChannel Summit will be held at the Bally’s Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, October 5-8, 2011. This event, which will feature 50 plus workshops for all professional levels, presents a unique opportunity for accessing and networking with a national audience of 700+ grant and nonprofit professionals and purchasing decision-makers. For more information about this event, click here.

FDP registration for September 2011 now open

The Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) has opened registration for their September 14-16 meeting. Go to this page to register. The agenda is still being finalized but the FDP meetings are always full of great content for research administrators and government grantors alike. Past meeting materials can be accessed at their web site.

All your Federal reporting are belong to us

Wow! Well, it looks like government reporting may be changing significantly if Rep. Darrell Issa's proposed new DATA Act legislation is passed (summary here). This act will consolidate the tracking and reporting of all Federal spending, on contracts, grants, loans, and government internal expenses, into one body, called the Federal Accountability and Spending Transparency (FAST) Board. This will be modeled on the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversaw the almost $800 billion Recovery Act stimulus.

When the Recovery Act was passed, many commentators cast doubt on whether the government could effectively stand up and operate such a large-scale reporting enterprise so quickly. The record shows, though, that the government was largely successful in this endeavor, and the public's appetite for more transparency hasn't waned at all. Rep. Issa's legislation makes a great deal of sense in light of this.

[Hat tip to Cornelia Chebinou at NASACT for getting word on this out so quickly.]

Are you a project manager with grants management experience?

We're currently looking for a project manager with extensive grants management experience to join TCG. To find out more, check out the job listing on our web site, and send us your resume. Among other things, the right person will have:

• Minimum of 4 years experience in Federal grants management programs, including policy, procedure, process, and system implementations.
• Minimum of 8 years experience in leading project teams, of which 6 must be specialized.
• Minimum of 2 years experience in understanding and documenting business process flows.

NIH Awards First-Time Grant to Long-Time Grants Management Experts

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded TCG a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to develop a cloud-based data sharing system for neuroscience. While TCG has helped agencies manage tens of thousands of grants for others for 17 years,this is our first Federal grant. TCG applied for and was awarded this grant in response to NIH’s call for grant applications from small businesses proposing innovative research in biomedical informatics and computational biology to promote the progress of biomedical research. Read the full press release here.

GAO report on Grants.gov is critical (again)

GAO is charged with monitoring the performance and progress achieved by Grants.gov over its lifetime and its latest report was released earlier this month. The highlights include:

• Agencies are being charged by Grants.gov based on their size and not their use of Grants.gov itself. This means that agencies like HUD (which is very large) is charged more than 2.6 times the fee levied on NEH (which is a much smaller agency), despite the fact that their use of Grants.gov is about equivalent to each other.
  
• The Grants.gov PMO doesn't report some important costs, which means that agencies have trouble understanding how much they should expect to pay for particular kinds of services.
  
• This also means that Grants.gov doesn't charge agencies for all known costs, meaning that some agencies subsidize the use of Grants.gov by other agencies.
  
• Funding from agencies is received at unpredictable times -- and often later than really needed -- meaning that the Grants.gov PMO cannot sufficiently plan investments and improvements.
  
• Accountability for governance of Grants.gov is split between the PMO, the Grants Executive Board (GEB), and HHS's Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). It's unclear how the GEB's input is used to set Grants.gov's future direction, and who is responsible for what.
  
• Grants.gov's performance metrics haven't been updated in a long time, and may not give an accurate representation of system performance.
  

The report also includes this note of optimism, though:

"A new federal grants governance model under OMB review would merge various Grants.gov governance entities and serve as the federal grants advisory body responsible for establishing the direction for and coordinating all governmentwide grants initiatives, including Grants.gov. As a preliminary, concept document, it is understandable that it contains few implementation details; however, the proposal lacks even an overview of several critical elements, such as how grants initiatives would be managed as IT investments."

If you're interested in learning more about how Grants.gov got to this point, take a look through this blog's archives.

Pass-the-hat funding gets a slap from OMB Watch

NextGov highlights an OMB Watch report that discusses the challenges facing e-gov initiatives that are funded using a "pass-the-hat" approach. Grants.gov is one of these initiatives, and faces multiple challenges in this area, as a recent GAO report about Grants.gov examined. OMB Watch does a fine job of illustrating what some of these challenges are, and how they impact the ability of government to operate effectively and for citizens to obtain the services they need.

Grants.gov will be competed among 8(a) firms

Much of the discussion lately in the grants management systems community has been about the upcoming recompete of the Grants.gov IT support contract, currently held by General Dynamics IT. A sources sought was issued in April and now word reaches me that a decision has been made to issue an RFP to only 8(a) small businesses. Clearly the responses to the sources sought from 8(a) companies convinced the Grants.gov program office and/or procurement officials that enough capability exists within that community to service Grants.gov's needs over the next five years.

Still, this is a change in approach for Grants.gov which has, up to now, procured all of its services through the CIO-SP2i contract vehicle managed by NIH. CIO-SP2i includes a few small businesses but is predominantly large business focused (though the new CIO-SP3 contract will be split between large and small businesses).

I'm curious to see whether the upcoming RFP includes suggestions for how Grants.gov may innovate over the next five years. A move toward cloud computing was mentioned in the sources sought notice, and has been discussed almost endlessly in the last few years. More importantly to the grants community, though, is the need to shift away from an e-forms architecture to a web-based approach, to avoid the overhead and difficulties associated with offline forms processing.

It should be an interesting summer!

NGMA Announces Federal Grants Management Training Webinar

The National Grants Management Association (NGMA) in alliance with Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell LLP is hosting a grants training webinar "Program Income--What Federal Strings Are Attached?" on Tuesday, May 17th starting at 2:00 p.m. EDT. Click here for more information and to register.