The Virginia Tech Agreements Tracking system is available for faculty researchers and department and center business managers to view.
Please log in to the My VT portal and click on the Research tab. The Agreements Tracking link appears in the Tools and Applications section and is marked as *NEW* so it stands out.
As an alternative, you can go to www.research.vt.edu/era to access the system and also see the supporting material, such as the Frequently Asked Questions and a short instructional video.
Agreements Tracking is a system that was developed at Virginia Tech to track new sponsored awards through the contract negotiation and setup phase. Faculty who are waiting for a new PAN can now view the status of their awards as OSP works on them. Business managers can see all awards in their department or center.
New awards are logged in the system, then assigned to a team or an individual administrator. Secondary assignments track things that run through legal review, compliance offices, or are waiting for a response from the sponsor. An activity log shows these concurrent assignments along with changes in status or any notes entered along the way. Documents are attached and shared. Faculty can monitor the progress of the contract negotiation on their new awards. Central office managers have dashboards with metrics on staff workloads, volume of activity, and time to completion. The system also tracks many kinds of non-funded agreements such as non-disclosure, facilities use, master agreements, material transfer, data use, MOU, etc. In many cases a non-funded agreement will be attached within the system, so it serves a repository for those documents.
Next time you or your faculty are wondering “Where’s my PAN?”, please go to this new system and have a look. Hopefully it will answer some questions quicker than a series of phone calls, or at least tell you who to call to get the latest information.
Please give it a try, and show your faculty how to use it. Faculty will automatically be directed to a list of their own agreements under active negotiation. From there it should be fairly self-explanatory.
Please contact rassupport@vt.edu with any questions or comments. Please see the Frequently Asked Questions as well.
— Matt Swift, Director of Research Administration Systems
