Did you know that there is a difference between proposal status and project status? “Proposal” status is what most people think of when they think of “statuses.” This field is driven by Proposal Development routing and drives Proposal Tracking workflow action items. It also can be used to control both baseline security access and “Status Level Security” within workflow security. It is a browse-enabled field…
and can be changed manually in Proposal Tracking’s Status History folder.
“So,” you’re asking yourself, “what’s the project status for?” For clients that have been around long enough to remember the “old portal,” the project status determined the initial break-down of proposals and their counts. Then and now, project statuses provide what is in effect an umbrella for multiple proposal statuses. That is, each proposal status is configured to be associated with exactly one project status. If you have only a relatively small number of proposal statuses, this umbrella-feature is perhaps of limited value. However, if you are taking full advantage of InfoEd Global’s workflow tools and its action items in PT and/or pre-reviews in PD, you have probably found that the number of your proposal statuses has increased – perhaps dramatically! – relative to your traditional list of them. Project statuses provide a means to return to a simpler time, at least in part. For example, you may have proposal statuses for Proposal Development of under development, in budget review, budget approved, in science review, science approved, and in final review. These might all be associated with a proposal while it is being assembled for submission. If you were interested in seeing how many proposals are out there with these statuses (that is, those currently being built), you could do a report or browse pulling in all six proposal statuses. Hopefully, you won’t forget one! On the other hand, you could also define a project status of pre-submission and associate the six proposal statuses to it. (Pre/Post Award Admin> Misc Setups> Status Code Grouping: Proposal Statuses are down the side and Project Statuses across the top.) You could then simply report or browse against a single project status.
The same approach could be used to group together all the proposal statuses associated with setting up an award (project status of award pending, say) or those associated with active projects. The number and values of Proposal Statuses and Project Statuses are completely up to you! Both are defined in Codes and Tables.