Central Office Request – Sponsor Approval for PI Effort Change

The SeRA Central Office Request allows department administrators to submit requests to their central sponsored research office from within the SeRA system.  Benefits of utilizing Central Office Requests include: custom forms and fields for different requests to facilitate department entry, the ability to add attachments relating to the request directly to the request form, being able to easily search and see when a request was submitted, what information was provided in a request, to whom a request was assigned, and the current status of a request.

Please do NOT use a Central Office Request to follow up on the status of an existing SeRA transaction (proposal, award, PTA, Central Office Request etc.).  Rather, please look up the relevant transaction in SeRA to view the latest information, and, if needed, follow up with the relevant transaction’s current assignee via email.

When to use the Central Office Request – Sponsor Approval for PI Effort Change:

To initiate a sponsor prior approval request, as required by a sponsor, to change the level of PI and/or Co-PI effort committed to a sponsor on a project

1. Log into SeRA
2. From the red banner at the top of any page within SeRA click on Search. Enter the relevant SPO #. The search will interactively display matches according to what was entered. Click on the appropriate blue reference number link to drill into the relevant record.

*Note - if you press Enter on your keyboard, the first listed search result will be automatically selected

3. From the Project Summary page, click on Start a Transaction menu, and select Central Office Request

4. A Start Transaction dialog box will open.  From the Request Type drop down menu select Sponsor Approval for PI Effort Change and click Start

5. Enter the following information in the Request Description textbox:

• Indicate how this request should be submitted to the sponsor i.e. from within a sponsor system or via email.
• If the request is being submitted to the sponsor via a sponsor system, indicate the system.  For example, eRA commons (NIH), Research.gov (NSF) etc.
• If the request should be submitted to the sponsor via email, please provide the sponsor POC name and email address.
• Amount of PI and/or Co-PI effort originally committed to sponsor, quantified as required by the sponsor i.e. in person months and/or %.
• New amount of PI and/or Co-PI effort being committed to sponsor, quantified as required by the sponsor i.e. in person months and/or %.
• Explanation for change
• Effective date of the change
• If the change in effort will also result in rebudgeting, and explanation of which budget categories will be affected, and the overall impact to the project

6. Attach relevant supporting documents including: