MyDay: SubAwards Replacement Application

By Paige •

Submitted by Veleria Boaten

We are pleased to announce a significant milestone in the MyDay program:

EA-2953 MyDay: Replace SubAwards Application was successfully deployed to production and is now available to staff and researchers as of December 1, 2020.  The replacement system is the first step towards AIS’s decommissioning as the university moves towards Workday slated for June 2021

The replacement Sub Awards system responsible for managing WashU’s approximately 1,650 active outgoing sub-award agreements with other entities that, as of May 2019, totaled nearly $64M is now in production. The system provides the University’s Research Administrative Community a competitive advantage over peers regarding helping administer, track, approve, and issue Outgoing Sub agreements.  This platform provides mechanisms to collect information from external collaborative research partners, meet regulatory compliance and institutional policy, and achieve consistency for review and issuing sub-award agreements across departments. These features promote managing the sub-award lifecycle to increase transparency, prevent unnecessary or redundant touchpoints, and deliver dynamically created sub-award contracts.

The WashU development team will continue to support the application to address defects, add features, and fully integrate with WorkDay to align with the go-live in June of 2021. Enterprise Applications and the program team will also be working with the WashU IT Cloud and Platform teams to continue to evolve the delivery and support model for these types of Cloud systems.

System highlights:

  • SubAwards was initially developed in PeopleCode and hosted as part of the AIS ecosystem.
  • SUBS replaced legacy FFATA in AIS for federal regulatory grant and contract reporting.
  • Our team also decommissioned the legacy SUBs application in AIS, which is now in  read-only mode
  • The MyDay program launched the replacement work after several months of planning in Late 2019.
  • The team developed the application using a cloud-focused technology stack based on .Net Core and Angular, and Microsoft Azure.
    • The scaleable cloud resources include
      • Docker Containers,
      • Kubernetes,
      • KeyVault,
      • Azure SQL, and
      • Blob storage. 
  • SUBS is the first application in the Enterprise Applications portfolio, following considerable work across WashU IT to plan and prove out a Next-Generation Application Platform and API layered development approach.
  • Our work was performed in collaboration with an outside partner using full cloud hosting of code, build, and deployments in Microsoft Azure DevOps. At the same time, we continue to manage high-level tasks through standard JIRA and departmental processes.
  • We used AGILE to support individual and interactions, a continuous working product, close customer collaboration, and active response to changes and challenges.
Figure 1 SUBAwards Ecosystem / S. Sparks

The MyDay Program, Enterprise Applications, and project management team acknowledges the many hours of collaborative work of our teammates and the support of our project sponsor, Joe Gindhart, to reach this milestone. 

Thanks to our core project team (Andy Zaruba, Bill Lancaster, Connie Motoki, Jean Shuler, Jessica Brannan, Jason Clevenger, Josh Edwards, Mark Craig, Richard Pryzma, Steve Sparks, Valerie White and Veleria Boaten), our development partners at Architect Now,  the OSRS testing team and our WashU IT teammates (Bill Hunn, Bill Kallbrier, Brent Sansoucie, Cory Cullen, Emily Asbury, Eric Suiter, John Bailey, Kim Scharringhausen, Matt Vore, Michael Ahearn, Michele Harashe, Mike Woodruff, Patti Haftarcyk, Sarah Raske and Travis Mossotti) for their support and expertise towards this project. 

Also thanks to the many training participants, and so many others that, as part of the Washington University in St. Louis day-to-day, make these extraordinary efforts successful.