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OSP Research Playbooks

The Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP), Operational Excellence team and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR) collaborated on initiatives to improve and streamline the management of externally sponsored research programs at the University. In a recent memo, you learned more about this partnership and the development of a new tool/resource called Research Playbooks.

Research Playbooks are an online resource intended to support researchers and research administrators in managing all stages of the award lifecycle – from proposal to closeout. The first Playbook to be released is the Proposal Playbook.


  • Coming Soon!


Intro to Playbooks

Proposal Playbook


Operational Excellence

The goal of Operational Excellence is to create a high-functioning administrative operation that supports the University’s key mission of teaching, learning and research.

IMPROVE SERVICE: Primary objective to improve service levels, considering culture at each school and unit. EMPOWER STAFF: Building a culture of performance management and continuous improvement. BENEFIT END USERS: Focus on improving quality, functionality, and accuracy of services to benefit end users. ENGAGE UNC COMMUNITY: Engage entire Carolina community in a structured, collaborative, and transparent process.

Work on this initiative engages the whole University community in a structured and collaborative way. Operational Excellence does not begin projects with a solution in mind, but with what we aspire our administrative operations to be. From there, a variety of University stakeholders work backward to create a plan to achieve the goal and the solutions are developed with the culture of each school and unit in mind.

To learn more about Operational Excellence work and its impact, read the Academic Year 2018-19 Annual Report.

Working with Research

The collaboration with the Operational Excellence team and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research focused on efforts to streamline the management of externally sponsored research programs at the University. The intent of this engagement partnership is to add structure to interactions between central research offices (OSP and the Sponsored Programs Office) and school/unit research administrators (RAs).

The research playbook for proposals will guide RAs through the pre-award process for federal and nonprofit awards. These new resources will help Carolina achieve the following objectives:

  • Reduce the time in award set-up
  • Improve the quality of proposal submissions
  • Reduce department response time

For more information on this collaboration please see this memo.

Contact

For any technical assistance or to report functional issues with a Research Playbook, please contact SponsoredPrograms@unc.edu.

For assistance on proposal or award management, please contact your OSP Sponsored Projects Specialist or SPO Grants Manager – find your contact here.