April 9, 2025

Your colleagues across CU have been busy developing solutions to streamline sponsored project-related tasks and improve customer service in various technology areas. Catch a quick summary of their work below -- and click on the links to dive deeper into the details.

Sponsored Projects-Related

Department Speedtype Check (Anschutz Medical Campus)

  • Sarah Horwitz developed a Smartsheet that runs monthly checks on the overall health of department SpeedTypes. It calculates burn rate, sends email reminders to grant managers, and generally facilitates status review and issue identification.
  • Read about it here!

Smartsheet Project Budget Projections (Anschutz Medical Campus)

  • This project budget template integrates with funding distributions and CU-Data reports to project spending and estimate unobligated funds. PIs have told developer Sarah Horwitz how much they appreciate using the tool.
  • Read about it here!

Sponsor Setup Automation: Streamlining Sponsored Projects' Customer Data Entry (CU System) 

  • Abhi Alampalli, Robert Kerley, Gauri Jinu, Valerie Carricato, and Dong Chen implemented a process to simplify adding more than 500 sponsors to the Finance System, eliminating three weeks of manual work each year.
  • Read about it here!

Subcontract Invoices (Anschutz Medical Campus)

  • Sarah Horwitz, Erin Poole, and Lisa Lewis developed a method for subcontract monitoring, designed to decrease mistakes and increase transparency.
  • Read about it here!

Technical Assistance Registry for Tribal Epidemiology Centers (Anschutz Medical Campus)

  • Erin Poole and Claudia Kramer developed a technical assistance (TA) registry to identify and connect TA providers with tribal epidemiology centers across the country.
  • Read about it here!

Technology / Customer Service

Departmental Indirect Cost Recovery Split % Report Automation (Boulder Campus) 

  • This new automation project, developed by Joy Vidalon and Carl Sorenson, modernizes the process of generating department funding allocation reports. Previously, these reports were created in Excel, requiring significant manual effort and up to three months to complete.
  • Read about it here!

Research Cores, Rewired: The Case for Automation with Tools You Already Own (Anschutz Medical Campus)

  • Alexandra Crook's project streamlines team operations and enhances customer service, supporting daily project tracking, secure data storage, and seamless platform integration.
  • Read about it here!

UCCS Computing Architecture Redesign (Colorado Springs Campus)

  • Greg Williams, Eric Schneider, Xiang Tan, and Isaac Poole consolidated and re-engineered all major UCCS computing environments into a single supportable solution -- saving  several million dollars of licensing and hardware costs, reducing energy needs by 50%, and streamlining support teams.
  • Read about it here!

Want to learn more about these, and other submissions to the CU I&E Awards Program?

Check out CU I&E Current Submissions. And look for our next article on five more outstanding submissions ...