Effective grant management relies on accountability, requiring every team member to understand and fulfill their specific responsibilities. This article outlines the grant manager’s critical role in overseeing both pre-award and post-award processes to ensure compliance and proper use of federal funds.
Key Insights
- Grant managers must maintain a comprehensive view of the grant process, correcting issues that arise when responsibilities are unclear or assumed to be handled by others.
- During the pre-award phase, responsibilities include managing the application process, conducting reviews, and applying scoring rubrics.
- In the post-award phase, grant managers oversee both fiscal and program monitoring, ensuring that designated personnel uphold procedural accountability and that funds serve their intended purpose.
This lesson is a preview from our Grants Management Certificate Program. Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Accountability is the cornerstone of effective grant management. Everyone needs to know their roles and responsibilities. A common problem in grant management is the assumption that someone else is on it.
Someone else is reviewing the progress or program reports, or someone else is given greater scrutiny of their interim fiscal reporting. And when this happens, and it does with federal agencies, recipients of funding alike, it's a grant manager's role to right the ship, to maintain a big picture view of the entire grant process. During pre-award, this means the application process, reviewing, scoring, and the rubric.
During post-award, where monitoring begins, it's the entire monitoring process and the two main components, the fiscal and the program monitoring. And also to identify the responsible parties whose professional task it is to stay on top of the recipient or sub-recipient. This ensures clear procedural accountabilities, and it also ensures that you and your recipients are effective stewards of federal grant funds, and ultimately that these federal grant funds are benefiting those whom they were directed to benefit.