You may have noticed that we have fallen a little quiet over the past couple of weeks on the blog and twitter. Behind the scenes we have been busy preparing for the launch of the new Awards Management System, developed with your input, which will go live tomorrow.

The Lincoln Awards Management System (AMS) will replace the current research, educational and consultancy project (proforma) approval process. Designed by academics, for academics, AMS is much more than the system it replaces and provides an integrated project development, approval and management tool.

• Staff costings are automatically calculated for you based on the parameters you enter into the system.
• You can now see where your project is in the approval cycle.
• There is an area to upload your documents associated with the project, so all your information is readily available in one place.
• On successful bids, you can monitor your actual spend against your budget. This is real time information extracted from the Agresso system.
• You can set yourself milestones which will automatically alert you with reminders about when they are due, stopping missed deadlines within the project.
• Project leads will have the ability to customise their own searches for their management information.

The new system will not reduce the support Research & Enterprise Development will provide to project development, but it will allow you to tailor this support to your needs.

A full set of awareness raising events and training is being planned for roll-out over the coming months and we look forward to seeing you and guiding you through the process. During this period we will continue to accept projects developed on the current system to ease the transition to the new.