Abstract

The Grants Office in ISGlobal has been in continuous evolution since its creation.
This evolution and changes in the organization has a rationale behind, and the aim of these presentation (or poster) is to explain to the audience how we were 10 years ago and how we are now, indicating the main changes, the reason why, the process taken to debate and decide the changes and their implementation and evaluation.
ISGlobal was created in 2010 linked to an existing research center, CRESIB (Barcelona Centre for International Health Research).
ISGlobal’s Grants Office had the same organization as CRESIB: one department reporting to the General Manager with two different areas: Preaward and Postaward.
In 2015 CRESIB and ISGlobal merged together, being ISGlobal the institution resultant.
In 2016, another research center, CREAL (Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology) merged with ISGlobal.
But this research centre had a different organization in terms of Projects Office, so a decision should be taken in order to decide how we would like to be organized in the new ISGlobal.
To do this, and more than 2 years before this merge, The Projects Office of both institutions (ISGlobal and CREAL) started a process to develop a benchmarking strategy to identify and describe the best project management approaches in other international research centres.
This benchmarking exercise provided valuable information to work towards management procedures harmonization.
In July 1st 2016, the merge process was completed and the new Grants Office was created, trying to keep the strengths of the former projects offices and integrating some changes we learnt from other institutions during the benchmarking process.
Moreover, in November 2019 we had the first Administration review from an external Committee.
This Evaluation of the Administration was carried out by an external Committee with members from several international research institutions. In this evaluation, the past and present of the administration were analyzed, with their goals and achievements, together with the planned actions for the following years. The committee evaluated the administration and sent a report with recommendations for the following years, being now part of the administration's roadmap for the coming years.
As a result of this review, we introduced in the Grants Office other organizational changes, with the aim to organize ourselves to deliver the best service to the institution. These changes, among other, are:
We have grouped the staff of postaward strategically into teams and these teams have a manager or team leader who report to the Head of Grants Office. These team leads create a less flat structure allowing for career progression opportunities, for instance.
In March 2022 we had the Mid-Term review, to follow-up on the recommendations and the status of the implementation of the actions, and the commitment is to evaluate, every 4 years, the Administration as we first started in 2019.
Another change we have introduced during 2022 is to include the Contract Managers as a part of the Grants Office, because their implication and knowledge of legal aspects are key for the Department.