RFS 6.20 Participant organisations

The 6.20 RFS release brings a change to the way in which proposal organisations are handled in RFS. Important notes about preparing for your upgrade are included in the 'Releasing the Changes' section below.

Until now, all types of organisation relationship types have been managed via the ‘Grant Organisations’ functionality, with each client adopting one of the following 2 models:

There are some weaknesses in the current solution that are being addressed by the changes introduced in v6.20:

• It is possible to create duplicate grant organisations on a single funding record.

• An organisation deleted within a proposal form may still be associated with the proposal record. 

• Organisation data captured in a proposal form does not reflect any changes made by an admin user after proposal submission. E.g. if an organisation is validated or updated after submission, and the form is then returned to the PI, it will still display the original unvalidated details. Saving the form will create a new, unvalidated grant organisation.

New Participant Organisations functionality is being introduced to manage Partner and Sub-contracted organisations. This includes:

• A new management page in the Console for admin users

• A new form control for capturing participant organisations, which will always be consistent with the data displayed in the Console management page

• A new form type for capturing metadata associated with participant organisations

• Updates to the API and Elements harvest to include participant organisations and to better handle associated metadata

Instructions for configuring participant organisations in a proposal form are available in this support article.

Grant Organisations will continue to be used for the primary funder and lead organisation / head funder, with changes to ensure:

• Any updates made to grant organisations via the management console will be reflected in the proposal form if returned to the PI.

• An individual organisation can only be added to a proposal as a grant organisation once to avoid the creation of duplicates. Note the same organisation may also be added as a partner and/or sub-contracted organisation, but it may not be added as both primary funder and lead organisation.

• Only one organisation may be added to a proposal for each type. 

For organisations associated with a proposal that do not fit into one of these categories, guidance on an alternative solution is provided in this support article.

A proposal for a new collaborative project is submitted where:

• the originating funder is the Royal Society, 

• the project is being led by University College London,

• your organisation is being subcontracted by UCL to deliver a part of the project, in partnership with University College London and Imperial College London, and

• you are subcontracting a part of your project commitment to Imperial College London. 

The grant and participant organisations added to the proposal under Model 1 would be:

Under Model 2, the organisations would be captured as:

The release of 6.20 will require form definition changes to be made, scripts to be run to migrate existing partner organisations to the new participant organisations data model, and potentially some manual and/or scripted data cleansing to be completed.

We will support you with each step, but it is important to schedule the upgrade at a time when this work can be undertaken, and to allow sufficient lead time before proceeding with the production upgrade.

The existing proposal form configuration for external collaborators will need to be updated to use the new participant organisation functionality as described in this support article.

We will provide you with a list of all affected form definitions and controls.

As part of the release, we will deduplicate and migrate over your existing partner and sub-contracted organisations to the new participant organisation data model.

Note that it is not possible to associate the previous external collaborator data (name, email, etc) with the new participant organisations, and so a report of all previously entered external collaborator data entered in forms will be provided. It will still be available to view in the proposal form pdf, however if the pdf is regenerated, either from being returned and re-submitted or via the Manage Forms page, it will only be visible in an archived version of the pdf.

For proposals at draft or returned status at the point of release, the external collaborator details will have to be re-entered in the form. The same is true for any submitted proposals that are returned to the PI after the release.

Since this exercise involves an element of data migration, we will analyse your data to identify any issues that need to be addressed to ensure a successful outcome. This includes identifying any:

• existing form configuration issues that might affect data quality

• existing grant organisations with an inconsistent type

• unexpected duplicates

• partner organisations where the associated grid row has been deleted from the proposal form but the organisation is still associated with the proposal.

Where required, we will work with you to agree your individual solution before any migration scripts are run.

Before your Test upgrade

1.  We will send you a list of forms and controls where:

• external collaborator config should be replaced with participant organisation config

• there are existing configuration issues

• there is other configuration that will need to be updated after the release

2.  We will also send you details of any existing data issues, including where relevant:

• grant organisations with incorrect types

• existing duplicates (excluding partner and sub-contracted organisations)

• existing partner orgs where grid row was deleted in the proposal form

• unvalidated grant institutions where proposal status is Under Review or later

• grant contacts linked to a non-primary grant organisation

Depending on volumes and action required, cleansing may be carried out manually or by an agreed script.

3.  For partner organisations, we will send you a list of:

• existing partner organisation duplicates, which will be de-duplicated during the release

• external collaborator metadata entered in forms

During the upgrade

4.  We will run a script to migrate a de-duplicated list of existing partner and sub-contracted organisations to participant organisations. The existing grant organisations will be deleted.

After the upgrade

5.  We will:

• check for any remaining data issues that require cleansing,

• provide you with a final list of external collaborator metadata, and

• update the form definitions for the STOCK forms, which can then be used for reference for your own form changes

It is important that you make the necessary changes to your proposal forms, as identified in the list of affected forms and controls, and test the changes before your Prod release. The previous configuration will no longer work. Any inactive form definitions that might be copied to create new forms should also be updated.

The process will be repeated for the PROD upgrade, with the exception of form definition changes which will be pushed from Test after the release.