RFS 6.5 release notes

The Elements Research Funding Solution (RFS) continues to grow significantly and in this release we are very excited to introduce new functionality to support post-award grants management. 

This new suite of functionality has been designed to help manage the transition from awarded grant to active project, and to support the management of projects throughout their life, including monitoring deliverables and managing change requests. New My Projects and Project details pages have been added to the core Elements interface to allow researchers to easily access information about their projects, whilst the Funding Management Console has been expanded with new functionality for administrators. 

RFS’s post-award functionality initially centers upon three areas:

• Project activation,

• Project deliverables management, and

• Change request management

This initial suite of post-award functionality supports researchers and administrators in managing the transformation from grant application to project, and offers functionality to allow maintenance of records and documents about the project in one place, visible to all relevant stakeholders.

Upon Project activation, all named internal participants will be able to access the Project record from the 'My Projects' space, accessible from the Funding menu.

Activating the Project then enables all post-award activities to be captured on the single record, visible to all relevant stakeholders.

Further information on Project activation is available here.

Various Project statuses are now available, enabling the Project to be tracked through its lifecycle, from activation through to closure.  All available statuses (both pre- and post-award) (including a description of the basic trigger for each) are described in this support article, and are visible to all relevant stakeholders.

This release includes functionality to support the management of deliverables for upcoming and active projects.  This includes creating a schedule of deliverables, updating the schedule, tracking the status of individual deliverables, and capturing information on completed deliverables and documentation.

This release also includes the facility to manage change requests for active projects, enabling you to initiate a change request and capture relevant information (e.g. type, description, whether funder approval is required), progress the request through various states of approval, including funder approval, and action the request once / if approved.

Further information on managing project change requests is available in this support article.

We have delivered additional improvements:

• New homepage actions for pending and overdue reviews / approvals

• Updated the Funding Opportunities homepage tile to include those opportunities where the funding type has not been set