Abstract
Background/Aims Group Health Research Institute (GHRI) utilizes Lean tools and techniques to enhance customer service, monitor compliance, and enhance project team interactions and communications. GHRI’s Grants and Contracts Administration (GCA) recently used Lean tools to design and implement a grant “portfolio management” system and process to support Principal Investigators (PIs). The system tracks six key indicators of funded grants: award status, budgetary spend rate, effort reporting, subaward execution, subawardee invoicing, and progress reporting. The process allows issues to be identified, tracked, and resolved early on with the project team before any serious problems arise.
Methods GCA conducted a series of stakeholder interviews to determine the viability of quarterly portfolio review meetings. Project teams liked the idea of discussing the PI’s portfolio, but were leery about quarterly meetings. Therefore, we constructed a process that maximized technology and built in flexibility regarding quarter meetings. The six key indicators were selected, defined, and placed on a dashboard in SharePoint. Each PI has a customized SharePoint page with a calendar showing all major grant deadlines and deliverables; a folder of documents related to the rankings and discussion during each quarterly meeting; and an issue tracker to follow-up on team-identified issues and problems requiring attention. Customer satisfaction data was also collected after each initial quarterly meeting.
Results As of October 2012, approximately 25 face-to-face meetings and 5 virtual meetings (i.e., materials and links emailed to the project team) have been completed (210 projects and 85 subawards will have been reviewed by the end of 2012). Satisfaction survey data indicates over 75% of team members (22 of 30 individuals) like the face-to-face meetings and hope to continue the quarterly review process.
Conclusions The new portfolio management process has been received favorably by GHRI project teams as a means of monitoring key indicators of PI project portfolios and proactively identifying and resolving any problem areas.
