Government Technology - January 2009 - (Page ca7)

Chicago Department of Public Health A new, integrated solution will help CDPH to manage grants more effectively and better match administrative resources to program needs. The department will use the new solution to inform program managers about grant opportunities, create project plans for pursuing grants and monitor progress on those applications. When a program wins an award, the system will convert the application plan to an implementation work plan. Then, as the program and support units execute each task, the grants staff will use CA Clarity to track its progress. “This is a new role for the grants unit, to monitor implementation,” said Erica Salem, the department’s director of grants. CA Clarity also will help the ﬁnance unit manage the department’s entire portfolio, matching resources to demand. “The Clarity tools give us better visibility to manipulate and do what-if scenarios, and do planning and forecasting,” Govia said. Data from the system will help the unit understand how much effort each grant requires, so it can apportion staff time more effectively, said Salem. It also will provide metrics for monitoring program performance, so the end of a funding period brings no unhappy surprises. “When risks arise that impact our ability to spend, we’ll be able to redirect that funding at an earlier stage,” Govia said. “This way, we won’t have huge carry-over requests at the end of the grant’s life cycle.” Eventually the Health Commissioner and all support units within the CDPH will have access to the application and will be able to use the information for decision making. As the CDPH starts managing grants more efficiently and spending funds more effectively, officials will spend less time on grant administration. “We hope to bring grant administration down to 10 percent or less and be able to focus 80 to 90 percent of our time on program outcomes,” Govia said. Less time spent pushing paper and responding to emergencies means a great deal more time available to serve Chicago’s residents. ❖ “When risks arise that impact our ability to spend, we’ll be able to redirect that funding at an earlier stage.” — Carlo Govia, ﬁrst deputy commissioner and chief ﬁnancial officer, Chicago Department of Public Health he Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) relies on grants for about 65 percent of its operating budget. That’s approximately $110 million a year in new grants, primarily from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration and the State of Illinois. For years, grants management at the CDPH has suffered from the department’s siloed structure, insufficient information technology and broken business processes. The consequences of these types of problems have been serious, and nowhere more so than in the process by which grants were applied for and managed. For example, grant-funded programs were communicating directly with funders in making changes to budgets and commitments, rather than working through the grants and ﬁnance offices, which are charged with supporting their efforts. Sometimes the department missed opportunities to apply for grants it might otherwise win. And programs haven’t always spent their grant money on schedule. Each year, the CDPH has closed out its grant periods with large proportions of unspent funds and has either lost those dollars or had to ask permission to carry them over into the next grant year. The problem was at its worst in 2006 when nearly $10 million in grant funds were T unspent. “Our grants have steadily been cut because we’re not able to spend the money in an effective way,” said Carlo Govia, ﬁrst deputy commissioner and chief ﬁnancial officer at CDPH. Also, the CDPH developed grant budgets for individual programs without considering the needs of the entire department or what services could already be provided by another functional unit. That practice has led to waste, as, for example, some programs often duplicate functions that the financial unit already provides on their behalf. The CDPH did not have sufficient visibility into existing capabilities or capabilities being created elsewhere in the department’s various units at any given time. It also lacked the information required to forecast needs and plan grant management activities. All this is changing as the CDPH has started using a new grant development, execution and governance solution based on CA Clarity™ Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) technology. The CDPH was already using CA Clarity™ in its program management office to manage information technology projects when it started looking at that technology to ﬁll other needs. “Further discussions with our CA team led to the unique conﬁguration of the Clarity solution to use it as our grants administration and management tool,” Govia said. 7

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - January 2009

Government Technology - January 2009 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for... Stemming the Retirement Tide Getting the Picture Fact of Matter Money Trail Rays the Roof Trick or Tweet? The Modern Way to Vote Products signal:noise

Government Technology - January 2009

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