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| Case Study: | NCI Roosevelt | ![[National Cancer Institute Logo]](images/NCIlogo-case.GIF){kind=small} |
| Client: | National Cancer Institute | |
| URL: | http://bingo.nci.nih.gov/Roosevelt-prod/ |
The Challenge
The Office of Space and Facility Planning was using a paper-based system for managing its grants and internal projects. In addition, the manager of the branch maintained multiple documents as well as email messages for projects without a way to link them. These circumstances made for a very cumbersome work environment.
System Background
The Roosevelt system was developed to satisfy the National Cancer Institute's Office of Space and Facility Planning's (OSFP) need to manage its internal projects and external construction grants in support of the NCI Cancer Centers and Cancer program.
System Description
The Roosevelt system is a secure interactive Web system designed to help OSFP manage its internal projects and grants. Specifically, Roosevelt is a tracking system used to collect and distribute information about OSFP's projects and the people, firms, institutions and documents associated with those projects. Roosevelt contains four distinct subsystems to accomplish this task: Person, Firm/Institution, Document and Project.
The Person subsystem is used to maintain information about individuals involved with a project. Individuals are associated with a project through the firm or institution of which they are a member. Therefore, whenever a firm/institution is selected within a project all the people who have been entered for that firm/institution are automatically associated with the project as well.
The Firm/Institution subsystem maintains information regarding companies and institutions associated with a project. Any firm can be entered into Roosevelt and associated with a project. Institutions, however, work a bit differently. Roosevelt has two institution tables. The larger one has all 45,000+ institutions from IMPAC II (I2) as items. The smaller table has only those institutions added through the Roosevelt interface. Therefore, when an institution is added via the Roosevelt interface the system searches the large list of institutions for matches to the text entered. This shortened list of institutions is generated so that institution list boxes displayed throughout the system only contain those institutions that the OSFP deal with. This makes the list boxes less cumbersome for the user and allows the page to displayed faster.
The Document subsystem is used to maintain the documents associated with a project. Documents are directly associated with a project when they are entered via the interface. The Document subsystem allows for the storage of different documents types (photo, drawing, spreadsheet, text) as well as different versions. In addition, the subsystem will automatically launch the software necessary to view a selected document (i.e. Word, Excel, etc.). Other functionality related to the subsystem involves the Unclassified Documents screen. Any document which has not yet been assigned a grant or work request number will be displayed here. Items can be entered via the Web interface or received as attachments to emails. When a document is received via email, the system allows for storage of the attachments as well as the text of the email. The email text and attachments will be listed automatically as related documents.
The Project subsystem is the culmination of information regarding a project. It is used to maintain information regarding the people, firms, institutions, and documents related to a project, in addition to information regarding the project itself. The subsystem allows easy access to the detailed records of the people, firms, institutions and documents associated with it as well as to project data items.
The TCG Solution
To create a secure interactive Web site that could only be used by authorized users in the OSFP at the NCI to manage all aspects of the business process. The new site would have four distinct subsystems to cover the business processes: Person, Firm/Institution, Document and Project.
Members of the team sat down with the client and conducted multiple brainstorming sessions to see how the OSFP's business process could be moved to the Web. Paper prototypes were developed for the client to review, and use, to walk through the system. Once approved, HTML pages were created based on the prototypes. A combination of graphics and text was used to make the site user friendly and easy to navigate. Each page contains a menu bar at the bottom from which a user can perform any function in the system.
We created a database on the back-end to support the data entry requirements of the front-end interface.
Given the needs of the manager to link email messages and documents they received to specific projects, TCG developed whole subsystems in Roosevelt to handle these needs. The unclassified documents subsystem was developed to aid management in controlling their email messages. It allows users to send email messages as well as attachments to the Roosevelt system. When received by Roosevelt, these messages are automatically listed in the unclassified subsystem. Users can then associate these emails with a project(s) in the system. Any attachments to emails are automatically associated with the project(s) as well.
To help management handle the documents associated with a project, the document subsystem was developed. This subsystem allows users to associate multiple documents with a project and gives them access to the full document from the project itself. Any documents sent along with email messages can be viewed from the Document or Project subsystems.
