Page 45 - GCN, April/May 2018

grant funds are aimed at specific policy priorities — fund- ing research into cures for disease, delivering educational services to underserved communities, stimulating economic growth and new business starts, and more. As such, the job of the grant manager should be helping grantees achieve the program mission, not manipulating a spreadsheet to send to Congress.
Although embracing an IT-based solution (instead of rely- ing on paper and spreadsheets) to better manage grants is be- coming a pervasive sentiment at all levels of government, the proliferation of options for grant solutions makes choosing a platform time-consuming and complex.
This article details how government agencies can make a grants management solution choice in light of the growing need to modernize.
Based on preferences, structure and business realities, agencies can determine whether they should lean toward a custom IT solution or whether an off-the-shelf option might be a better choice.
Based on 20-plus years of experience designing, developing
and deploying grants management solutions for government, we have found that most federal, state and local agencies have varying grants management technology needs. A few of those needs are important signals that can point to the type of solu- tion that will best serve a particular agency.
SCORING THE SELF-ASSESSMENT
• A score of 12 or below indicates a strong preference for COTS options.
• A score of 24 or above indicates a strong preference for cus- tom solutions.
• A score of 13-23 indicates that a hybrid, platform-based so- lution might be the best option. Indeed, many customers de- termine that the path forward is not in the extremes but in the middle of the spectrum.
Although many of these dimensions are qualitative, the “cost appetite” can be made somewhat quantifiable. The ac- tual cost to design, develop, test, implement and support a solution can vary widely based on specifications and require- ments. The cost trade-offs between custom solutions and
Cost comparisons for a hypothetical grant management solution
To provide a rough order of magnitude of the cost to implement a grants management solution for a single agency, the high-level estimates by cost category below illustrate the differences between custom and COTS solutions.
For ease of comparison, we estimated costs for a medium-sized federal grant-making agency that issues $1 billion in grants annually, with 500 agency users and 2,000 grantees. We also assumed that the agency’s scores for the first five topics in the self-assessment framework shown at left is 3 in each case (i.e., neutral). Different scores for those self-assessment topics would affect the costs shown below.
COST CATEGORY CUSTOM SOLUTION 1 (FEDERAL)
Design and detail requirements $ 1,000,000 Development/configuration 5,000,000
Customization to out-of-the-box capabilities Data migration (from legacy systems) Change management and training
Project management
COTS SOLUTION 1 (FEDERAL)
$ 250,000 1,000,000 1,000,000
150,000 700,000 750,000
1,000,000 N/A2 2,000,000 500,000 $ 7,350,000 3 0.74%
N/A 150,000 500,000 1,500,000 4,000,000 Infrastructure/hosting 250,000 Licenses N/A
Annual operations and maintenance
Additional environments TOTAL
% of grant value awarded
Notes:
N/A $ 12,400,000 3 1.24%
1 These costs are estimated for a hypothetical agency. A specific agency with specific programs might have different requirements and thus anticipate different costs. 2 The COTS option resides in the cloud, with hosting costs incorporated into software license fees.
3 Estimates provided in this table depend on the specific needs/requirements and capabilities of the agency and its grant programs. Estimates are illustrative only; they do not apply to any specific agency.
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