Review and approval configuration

The Awards Management module supports Proposal review and approval workflows that enable relevant institutional stakeholders to scrutinise submitted Proposals in order to endorse (or not) full application to funder (for external awards) or in order to endorse (or not) award of funding (for internal awards).

The default review and approval configuration is set on the individual Funding Opportunity.  For example, for small Travel grant opportunities, you may wish to only have one level of approval (e.g. Head of Department), but for large project grant opportunities, you may need many levels of review and approval.  The default configuration can be modified on an individual Proposal (e.g. if you want to add an additional level of approval if the application is over a certain amount).

Awards Management supports three types of review and up to six levels of approval (pre- and post-award):

• Pre-award Review

  • Finance review

  • Ethics review

  • Legal review

• Pre-award Approval

  • Level 1 (Head of Department, or equivalent)

  • Level 2 (Head of Faculty, or equivalent)

  • Level 3 (Head of Institution)

• Post-award Approval

  • Post Award - Level 1 (Head of Department, or equivalent)

  • Post Award - Level 2 (Head of Faculty, or equivalent)

  • Post Award - Level 3 (Head of Institution)

There are three Awards Management Reviewer roles, tied to the three Awards Management Review types available:

• Reviewer - Finance (Funding)

• Reviewer - Ethics (Funding)

• Reviewer - Legal (Funding)

There are three Awards Management Approver roles, tied to the six Awards Management Approval types available:

• Approver - Level 1 (Funding)

• Approver - Level 2 (Funding)

• Approver - Level 3 (Funding)

Where a Reviewer or Approver has been assigned to a Proposal (either individually, or as a Reviewer / Approver for the Group in question), they will have access to that Proposal for the purposes of submitting a review / approval decision.

During your implementation, you should ensure all necessary reviewers and approvers for each Group are assigned the relevant role(s) to enable them to undertake reviews and approvals.

In the Admin Console, go to the Funding Opportunity > Edit > Review types, then 'click to add Review types'.

Select the desired review type:

Then configure that review type as follows (ignore all other settings):

• Select 'User Flexiforms Review Form' (automatically selected from v6.20), and select the applicable Review form (guidance on configuring Review and Approval forms is available here.)

• If you want Reviewers and Approvers to have access to all attachments in the Proposal, in the 'Information Sent to Reviewer' section, select 'Include Application Attachments'

• If you want to hide Reviewer / Approver details from project team members on the Proposal details page, unselect the 'Show Reviewer Details in Portal' (from v7.0)

• Set the due date for the review / approval

  • If a specific date, select 'Date' and input the date

  • If number of days after dispatch, select 'Number of days after review dispatch' and input the number of days

Once configured, click 'Save'.  If you'd like to add another review type, select 'Back'; otherwise, select 'Close'.

Note that in order to be able to record the overall Approval decision for Proposals, you MUST include the 'Approval Decision' review type.

Once all desired default review types have been selected and configured for the Funding Opportunity, no further action is required until a Proposal is submitted and the submission requires validation, and the reviews and approvals assigned and dispatched.

If the review and approval process is already underway and you would like to add an additional default review type to all Proposals, you should add it to the Funding Opportunity as per the steps described above, and then apply it to Proposals already Under review (as per the screenshot below) (note that you may need to refresh the screen for the review type you just added to be available in the dropdown).  This will then introduce that review type to all Proposals for this Funding Opp without you having to add it manually to each one. 

Ignore the 'Confidentiality/Rebuttals' section.