Foord: One of the things we realized early on is that the lifecycle of the grant is really important to understand, and there are a lot of people that need to be involved. You have the grant writer putting the grant application together, plus the writer's supervisor. That's the pre-award part of it.

Those two people have to work with their fiscal staff and the people who will implement the project. It might be different: it might be an actual project manager as opposed to the grant manager, and there are a lot of other partners within that department or in that functional area. But there are other support offices that need to be involved, too, so we thought of that as the team and tried to make sure we had all the key players involved from the very start.

We also realized there are a lot of distinctions from grant to grant. Even within the state system, there are very different programs, and federal grants are all very different as well; how to actually implement them is different from grant to grant. We were really keen on getting the people in the room as much as possible. We made sure not to rush that part of it, to give a lot of thought to it, and to add to our group of people as necessary with other insight because there are others who were outside of our core group that we wanted to bring in at various times.

Those were important lessons that we learned. Being flexible and keeping the larger perspective of the grant in mind, rather than just applying for a grant or managing the fiscal aspects of the grant.

Reed: In terms of the dashboarding, you think about how users are going to access this functionality. How did you integrate that part into the project?

Jones: We have users accessing the solution through the portal, so folks who are not as comfortable with standard core SAP have a little more user friendly way to access this information. They go into the RPM solution, and they can develop their proposal budget just like they would normally do on an Excel spreadsheet or in a Word document or sometimes even with pencil and paper. Now they can actually see that grant proposal or application go through the various decision points and through the process.

Once that grant is awarded, Grant Manager can then run standard SAP reports through the portal, so we haven't forced those folks to go back into the core SAP system. They're really happy with that; that was something they really liked. These reports now mirror the grant reporting requirements. However they need to report back to that grantor agency, the reports are coming out of the system looking very similar to that, so they are able to generate their reimbursement requests very easily, and we have the audit trail to support it, which is very important to us.

The one thing I think was really key out of this whole project was this Task Manager. We have had more positive feedback from that than anything else we did. With this custom Task Manager, grant managers can keep track of any task they can think of on a grant. It could be a quarterly report, it could be a reminder to submit or call someone on a specific date, etc. Anything they need to track on their grant, they can do with this Task Manager.

They can also assign tasks to other folks, either within our agency or outside of our agency. They can then look on the dashboard for those tasks to see where they're at in the process and what kind of progress is being made on those tasks: in progress, almost complete, not even started yet. So they really now have a true management tool to help with grant management.

Many of them told us if it was just going to be an extra step they had to do, it wasn't really going to help them much. But with this Task Manager, they're starting to see real benefit from it. That was pretty exciting to us.

Reed: Listening to you talk, there were a few lessons that stood out for me. One was getting stakeholders in the room and involved so they don't get any surprises later and have input. The other was visibility. Also, giving users information in the form that's most useful to them, as opposed to making them go somewhere else for it. Finally, give them tools like task management so they feel like they're saving time, not just learning something new that they might not have time for.

Where there any lessons I missed that you wanted to let our listeners know about?

Foord: Use or acceptance is key, and it's just like any other SAP project: the terminology is different and it's new functionality.

Jones: We also had new people involved in this process than we previously had involved in SAP or any of the project management because we're looking at grants from a project management perspective. We've always done that on some level, but now we're kind of forcing it with a tool as well. It's new to people, but they're starting to accept it and we're continuing to work with them.

Reed: I suppose any change like that is going to be gradual, but it sounds like you are on the right track. Freddy, were there some key points you took away from that discussion?

Guerrero: I would like to encourage everyone to get involved in the SAP Community Network. By doing this, you will learn faster by finding solutions to the problems. It will also give you the ability to share some of the experiences with other users. It will also promote solutions to the products using the SAP Community Network, like the SAP EcoHub. Finally, I recommend using all the components, like the Business Objects Community and the SAP EcoHub.

Reed: One thing I wanted to mention to our listeners is that all the parties on this call are going to be at ASUG Sapphire 2010, so you can look for them there and follow up on some of the solutions that have been discussed today. With that, I wanted to thank all of you - Freddy, Marlene and Kelly - for taking the time to share this collaborative story with us.

Before we sign off, I want to make sure that our listeners know how to access the Business Objects Community as well as SCN. The direct URL for the Business Objects Community is boc.sap.com. If you are already a member of BPX or SDN, you can access the BOC through the main horizontal menu. If you are not yet registered with SAP's online communities, you can register for all three of those communities at the same time.

I'd like to thank our listeners for joining us today for this SAP Community Network podcast. This is Jon Reed of JonERP.com signing off. We'll see you online soon at scn.sap.com.