A key pipeline for research funding at Washington State University is flowing faster. After faculty voiced concerns about their research funding being inhibited by a bottleneck at the Office of Sponsored Programs Services, university leaders provided more resources and implemented a plan to improve the speed that accounts are set up and administered at WSU.
Results are already being felt. The office went from a high of 850 accounts waiting to be set up in August 2021 to less than 100 in January 2022. The waiting period for accounts has also dropped from an average high of three months to around 15 days. The progress is good, administrators said, but the work is not done.
“This is a decade long challenge that we’re trying to overcome, and it’s going to take a sustained effort to get where we want to be,” said Matt Skinner, WSU’s senior associate vice president for finance. “We’re grateful for how faculty and university leadership have come together to provide some resources to increase capacity. The faculty feedback has been helpful in highlighting this need. We’re going to continue working hard to improve services, and please keep that feedback coming.”
Research award funding has grown at WSU, rising from a total of about $152.7 million in the 2006 fiscal year to nearly $269 million in the 2020 fiscal year. At the same time, the team that administers those awards, Sponsored Programs Services, has averaged just 16-18 employees, some of whom were on a temporary basis.
When Casey St.Clair took over as director of Sponsored Programs Services in 2018, she did some benchmarking against peer institutions. She found that full-time account administrators at the other institutions each support about $10 million in expenditures, annually. At WSU, it was $26 million per person, 2.5 times the industry average. At the same time, rules and regulations for federal grants – which make up the lion’s share of awards at WSU – have also increased, making the administering of those awards slower and more complicated for the team that also must ensure compliance with various regulations as well as sponsor terms and conditions.
Working with faculty and other WSU leaders, St.Clair and Skinner came up with a plan to attack the problem on several fronts including increasing staffing levels, adding capacity using temporary staffing agencies, and engaging Huron Consulting Group to augment the team and provide insights for improvement. Sponsored Programs Services also partnered with WSU’s Office of Research and two colleges to improve workflow through a pilot project to train staff from those areas on account creation in Workday.
As a result, the account creation backlog has decreased as has the time waiting for setup to be completed. The next focus area will be to improve timeliness of award invoicing and closure. So far, staffing at Sponsored Programs Services has increased to 30 with a mixture of permanent, temporary, and contractual affiliate support positions. The goal is to reach 40.
Professor Sterling McPherson noticed the problem through his own research experience and in talking with other investigators. McPherson co-chairs the P2 Committee which looks at pre- and post-award processes, and currently serves on the steering committee for Huron, the research consultant.
“We’re a large university that needs to be able to bring in large grants and spend them accordingly and on time. Account setup can be a major bottleneck that impacts every investigator’s research program,” McPherson said. “There has been a significant improvement. While we have made progress on account setup, we’re all well aware that additional work needs to happen on invoicing as well as recruitment and retention of staff to make sure that these gains are not lost.”
The biggest hurdle, St.Clair noted, is recruiting people, which is especially difficult in the current pandemic employment climate.
“We have a ways to go, but the incremental increase in total staffing has already been immensely helpful,” said St.Clair. “Huron has also helped us identify opportunities for improvement in various business processes, ultimately reducing administrative burden for my team and facilitating their ability to operate more efficiently.”
St.Clair added that those changes help not only with efficiency but also with retention. “My team is made up of professionals who care about doing their best work,” she said. “Ensuring they have the resources to be successful is critical to retaining them in the long run, which is critical to effectively supporting WSU’s research portfolio overall.”
