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Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

  • 1.  Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    RISING STAR CONTRIBUTOR
    Posted 06-09-2021 12:15
    What is your process for onboarding new Faculty or Employees into Cayuse? Do you use HR Connect?

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    Jonathan Lew
    ERA Officer
    University of California, Irvine
    Irvine CA
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  • 2.  RE: Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    Posted 06-09-2021 13:51
    Hi Jonathan,

    We conduct thorough training with central office staff focusing on the work they'll do in Cayuse. For example, for pre-award admins, we'll focus on developing the proposal, and provide a brief overview of Award and Project Admin. If new hire is in post-award, we do a quick overview of proposal sections and focus most of the time on awarding proposals and creating awards/projects. We summarize how other users on campus utilize the software so the new employee understands how their work affects others and vice versa.

    For faculty, it varies. They won't attend workshops. Most of the time to admins working with each PI will email instructions of what we need them to do and then answer their questions. Our faculty find Cayuse intuitive and do not need much training beyond the URL to login. :-)

    Our business model is to have the research admin start each proposal and fill out all of the non-science portions. We require that the PI answer the questions in the Regulatory Compliance, Export Control, Intellectual Property and Conflict of Interest sections; plus certify that the proposal is ready for submission during routing.
    Hope this helps,
    Terri

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    Terri Hall
    Director, Research Business Intelligence
    University of Notre Dame
    South Bend IN
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  • 3.  RE: Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    SUPERSTAR CONTRIBUTOR
    Posted 06-11-2021 11:06
    That's pretty much what we do, too.  We find that we can start the Cayuse pre-award record and complete most of it more quickly and more accurately than the PIs.  No disrespect to the PIs, but they may work with Cayuse a few times a year, and we do it all day every day.  That helps our reporting data, since we can ensure that the data points we want to track are entered in a form that will be recoverable.  And then the PIs can focus on the science rather than trying to remember how to use the system.

    That said, they've taken to the routing and the system-to-system capabilities with no problem - and a little bit of pleasure.   We've had more pushback from business managers than PIs, for whatever that's worth.  And even that seems to be over.

    One thing we're under-utilizing is the ability to load draft documents into 424.  I have always worried in the last minute flurry of "no wait, use this draft.  No, let's go back three drafts and use that one.  We called it "final-final-really-whoops, no" that the next-to-last draft of something is the one that will become part of the proposal.  Yes, we have checks and double-checks, but those last few minutes can become a little wild.  If a document were safely over there in the draft column, we couldn't accidentally submit it - is what I'm thinking.  But I have to get the staff on board for that before I start sweet-talking the facullty.

    -Andrea

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    Andrea Buford
    Director, Office of Sponsored Programs
    Oakland University
    Rochester MI
    (248) 370-3789
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  • 4.  RE: Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    Posted 06-14-2021 05:46
    We enter in all the SP information, except when a PI surprises us and starts a proposal and initiates routing! We, too, need answers about COI, export controls, etc., not to mention who the other members of the research team are, correct proposal title (I can't tell you how many proposals have "Jones NIH" or "draft proposal" for their title), and other proposal information. We recently created a form to collect this information and include a general proposal checklist with it (and a more specific one later).  We were emailing them to collect this information, so we just put the questions on one document (fillable PDF, brief), so aside from the questions  like "What is this form? I've never seen it before," PIs haven't fussed about  filling it in. They know that they need to provide the information to us one way or the other.

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    CarolynElliott-Farino
    Director, Preaward
    Kennesaw State University
    cellio12@kennesaw.edu
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  • 5.  RE: Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    SUPERSTAR CONTRIBUTOR
    Posted 06-14-2021 12:38
    Ummm.... yes, re: the info.  There are several started proposals in our system called - apparently- "THIS IS NOT A TITLE."  The PI just hasn't nailed onto the title yet, and we have to get started on our bits.  With that absurdity staring us in the face, we're not going to forget to change it and submit it by accident, but we can still move the record forward.

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    Andrea Buford
    Director, Office of Sponsored Programs
    Oakland University
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  • 6.  RE: Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    STAR CONTRIBUTOR
    Posted 06-15-2021 06:49
    We also manually enter our new faculty (and staff, if they will be project directors).  We've entered all new faculty in the past, but now just add them as needed.... when we know they will be submitting.

    We also do most of the Cayuse entries ourselves.  As Andrea said, we can do it faster and more accurately, and it allows our PIs to focus on the things we can't do.  I know that I have trouble with the systems I only use once or twice a year, so I understand that it can be frustrating for our faculty to use Cayuse and sponsor systems.

    We do also upload drafts more now that we have an option to show it as a draft.  We have a lot of state and private agreements, and usually need to route for approvals before the narrative is finalized, so this allows everyone to know it is a draft.

    Pam

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    Pamela Vargas
    Director, Research & Grant Development
    Southeast Missouri State University
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  • 7.  RE: Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    Posted 06-14-2021 05:52

    Angela, what is the "ability to load draft documents into 424" that you reference?



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    CarolynElliott-Farino
    Kennesaw State University
    cellio12@kennesaw.edu
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  • 8.  RE: Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    STAR CONTRIBUTOR
    Posted 06-14-2021 06:13
    I'm sorry if I didn't make much sense, I do not have much of a tech vocabulary.  I was trying to describe how we import new students into Cayuse so that they can use the system.  They do not have access until we add them which we do once a week.

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    Angela Bain, CIP, CIM
    Director, IRB Office
    Kennesaw State University
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  • 9.  RE: Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    SUPERSTAR CONTRIBUTOR
    Posted 06-15-2021 04:37
    If you create a paired record for system-to-system submission, Cayuse will let you put drafts of, say, the abstract, in a right-hand column.  You and the PI can just keep working over there, with no danger that the document will be submitted with a draft document.  It can't happen.  This keeps all those drafts out of email inboxes, which for me is so important.  I get 800-1000 emails a day - and I only wish they were cat pictures and easily delete-able.  I tell people, with mild hysteria in my voice, that my inbox is where information goes to die.  Find some other way of telling me what you need me to know!

    Then, when everyone agrees that the draft document is final - like REALLY final- you can slide that most recent draft document over into the left-hand final column and that box is ticked off.  I don't think this functionality exists for the budget (but I could be wrong), but for text-based documents it's mostly there.

    Does that make sense?  I can probably figure out how to do a screen shot of a Cayuse proposal, if that would help.

    A

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    Andrea Buford
    Director, Office of Sponsored Programs
    Oakland University
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  • 10.  RE: Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    Posted 06-15-2021 09:41
    Awesome! I was not aware of this -- will check it out. Thanks!

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    CarolynElliott-Farino
    Kennesaw State University
    cellio12@kennesaw.edu
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  • 11.  RE: Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    STAR CONTRIBUTOR
    Posted 06-11-2021 11:28
    I am going to admit, I do not know how our process works.  I was responsible for the upload for awhile but I screwed it up more often than not.  Here is my elementary version that omits correct tech terminology: I would get an email with a file once a week and open it using notepad and then type something in the command prompt to execute this script that my IT guy made that seemed to work like magic when he used it but for me I just kept getting errors.  I have no idea if there is a simple way to do it or if that was the simple way to do it and I am just that deficient with technology.  I can try to put you in touch with the gentleman here that knows the things.

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    Angela Bain, CIP, CIM
    Director, IRB Office
    Kennesaw State University
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  • 12.  RE: Onboarding New Faculty / Employees

    Posted 06-14-2021 05:52
    We use HR Connect for faculty but manually enter employees who are part of a sponsored program since there are so few of them compared to the overall number of non faculty employees at the university. This works for SP/424 since the vast majority of users are faculty. The IRB team (Angela's group) have to add students so they are constantly adding users, unlike preaward. You can bulk upload users using a form,  as often as you like, or you can add them manually like we do (we need the person's employee ID number). Cayuse can advise about how the bulk upload  process works.

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    CarolynElliott-Farino
    Kennesaw State University
    cellio12@kennesaw.edu
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