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10x envisions a future where federal agencies have visibility into the status of grant findings so that they can track the resolution progress across agencies resulting in a reduction in duplication of finding resolution work and better analysis and understanding of grantee risk.
- This is documentation for 10x project that has gone through 3 phases exploring how technology can improve the public’s experience with the government. We are working toward this vision by creating a simple way for federal agencies to get and use single audit data so they can assess the status of each grantee faster and resolve grant findings so that they can avoid delays that lead to additional time and money and allow them to focus their time on higher value work like assessing grantee risk.
- Our team follows user-centered design and agile development best practices. Our work is built incrementally in a build - test - learn process where feedback from the actual people who will use our products to inform how we define success for our products and the next feature to build, which delivers real value to real people in real-time.
- We work in the open, with open-source tools. We believe this approach is a good fit for government so that all agencies can use or re-use our work to fit their agency needs. Our work is on behalf of the public and is in the public domain.
We validated the problem: Grant reporting is a time consuming process that requires duplicative data entry into multiple systems that don’t talk to each other. The team observed the grant management processes and burdens from the perspectives of a grant recipient and a granting agency, we brainstormed and explored possibilities for a more efficient and streamlined reporting process.
The use case for phase 2’s prototyping was that a simple typo in a grantee’s address can prompt a weeks-long clarification process, during which grantees don’t get paid — and can’t do their work. The team made a simple proof of concept, "Auto-populating the FFR," that uses data from the SAM API to auto-populate the SF-425, also known as the FFR (the Federal Financial Report) to reduce duplicative data entry in a process where weeks of delay can be introduced by simple manual data errors.
With more research conducted at the start of phase 3 we developed prototypes to address user stories from our research to show proof of concepts for a 10x level impact for the people who receive grant funding and the federal employees who manage and audit these grants.
- As an agency user I want to access a grantees program and financial information in the same place so that I can save time assessing grantee risk status.
- As an agency user I want to know what other agencies have findings with the same grantee’s that I have so that we don't duplicate work.
- As an agency user I want to know if my grantees has a finding with other agencies so that I have a better understanding of grantee risk and can coordinate with that other agency if there is overlap.
- As an agency user I want to visualize the relationship between grantees and sub-grantees so i can understand where grant money is flowing and which sub-grantees are getting the most money and have the most risk.
- As an agency user I want to know how much time a grantee has to respond to questions about an audit finding so I prioritize my work and prompt grantees to respond.
- As a grantee I want to know if there are any questions about an audit finding and who needs to know, by when so I prioritize my work and respond to the right person with the right information within the mandated timeframe.
- As a grantee I want to streamline my communication with agencies so I avoid duplication of work and focus on delivering on grant outcomes.
- As a grantee I want to reduce duplicative data entry in audit reporting so I avoid duplication of work and focus on delivering on grant outcomes.
- As an auditor I want to reduce duplicative data entry in audit reporting so I avoid duplication of work and focus on delivering on grant outcomes.
- Finding the audits that federal agency teams need to oversee currently ranges from a few hours to two days a month just to identify the single audits relevant to them (depending upon the number of grantees they monitor). Extracting the data from audits and importing them into an agency workflow takes more time.
- (TBD quantifying this) The 10x pdf scraper automates identifying key data in audit PDFs so people are not manually combing through the PDFs looking for keywords.
- Currently up to 40% of a grants budget can be spent on reporting on the grant
- Streamline reporting requirements and reduce duplication of data entry into the clearinghouse
- (TBD quantifying this)
- Speed to access audits from the clearinghouse increases