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Best Practices: Resolving Grants Management Issues
When Multiple Departments are Involved
By William K. Boyer
Grants and Special Projects Coordinator, City of Pensacola



We’ve all heard the expression “In a perfect world,” right? “In a perfect world, that would never happen.” Well, let’s face it, we don’t live in a perfect world and things do go awry. The trick that determines how effective the result will be is handling issues immediately and proactively.
 
Recently, I had a situation with an arm of my municipality where multiple hands were working on different components of grants management duties for specific grant types and they were not working at maximum efficiency. We discussed what the best course of action would be, and my input was requested. Being a problem-solver by nature, my immediate thought was, “This is happening now, but how do we proactively resolve it for the future?”
 
Now, this department deals with one form of grants, and I work with them on general oversight, so you would think the answer is easy: I take over the grants management, right? Wrong. Doing that would only unnecessarily rob this department of a resource and would give the impression that we are punishing them. I wanted to encourage them to keep up their good effort and improve their skills, so I started thinking of a way to allow them the most ability, while also allowing me to be able to provide more guidance and mentoring opportunities.
 
After some long hours of thinking and a couple of strong cups of hot tea, Eureka! I found a solution. Below are tips that helped me reach this solution.

  • Work with departments to strategically coordinate duties. It’s a good idea for one person to be the main point of contact for your grants who is has “full administrative oversight” with working knowledge of their reports, reimbursements, progress, etc. But as we all know, one person can’t do it all. Work with departments to strategically coordinate who will be responsible for duties like project implementation and who will handle other duties like financial while maintaining the one person who can serve as your liaison between the grantor and the departments and will be the “gatekeeper” for your organization.

    If you are the main grant person for your organization, but you have other departments that handle grants and the people working on them, establish one point of contact who knows all the workings of the grant from reporting to reimbursements.

  • Have regular check-ins with department staff. Don’t go too long without checking in with the other departments that manage the day-to-day operations of their grants. Schedule weekly check-ins to make sure everything is running smoothly

  • Make sure you are getting all alerts and notifications. If you are the organization’s main grants contact, ensure you are on all grantor’s email list, regardless of whether you are the one actively dealing with the grant. If you know the grant deadlines, you can get ahead of the game and proactively think of potential issues and how to work around them before they happen. Remember, as the main grant manager for your organization, it all comes back to you! Also, make sure every grantor has your contact information so they can contact you with any big needs.

  • Work with department leaders on training. Again, be proactive. Communicate with department leaders to set up training on best practices for grants management. Teach staff and leaders the above information and other related specifics on how they can be proactive in managing grants.

  • Review, rethink, repeat. As the main grant lead for your organization, always be on the back end reviewing and reevaluating your best practices, determining what needs to be tweaked and amending procedures for the better. Change is constant!

And there it is friends, my best practices for resolving grants management issues that may arise when multiple departments are involved. Now get out there and manage those grants!
 
William (Kevin) Boyer is a grants and special projects coordinator for the City of Pensacola, Florida. He works with the city to ensure projects funded by grant awards are properly managed so that funds are spent in compliance with state and federal regulations and grant objectives are met.