Glitches Beset Project ADAPT

Harvard's new financial management system, Project ADAPT, is plagued with across-the-board implementation problems at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, according to an update presented to the Faculty Council yesterday.

Academic departments, which must use ADAPT to submit and report on income and expenses, are with few exceptions struggling to do even those tasks they could before the system's July 1 launch.

"Of over 100 departments, I would be very surprised if there are 10 that are having an easy time," said Geoffrey M. Peters, FAS associate dean of administrative resources, who gave the presentation.

The current phase of ADAPT is intended to provide a wide range of financial services--including invoice submission, travel reembursement and grant management--all on a computerized system uniform across the University.

But the implementation problems have resulted in a variety of accounting snarls--not to mention frustrated and perplexed Faculty members.

For instance, American Express has canceled at least one Harvard expense account credit card because of the problems.

According to Peters, professors who deal with large amounts of grant money are having particular trouble using ADAPT, although the program was designed with just such professors in mind. Were it to work as planned, the program would allow researchers to calculate instantly how much of their grant money has been spent.

"If they have a hard time tracking their grant account, they run the risk of overspending them, and that's a problem," Peters said. "They either have to go back to the funding agency and ask for more, or the deptartment has to make up the difference, or ultimately FAS would have to make that up. This is a problem we had hoped ADAPT would cure."

ADAPT is more complicated than the old system--for instance, routine ledger codes that were once a memorizable 14 digites are now 33. But Peters said that the systems team hopes some problems will be solved as user training and familiarity continue to improve.

"It's getting better every day," said Peters. "I would be disappointed if we didn't reach a kind of steady state within 6 months."

In other business, the council also considered a set of recommendations from the FAS Committee on Research Policy. Among the recommendations was a proposed change to policy on corporate sponsorship of undergraduate research.

According to Committee Chair Paul C. Martin '52, the new policy would allow graduate and undergraduate students to enter into agreements to receive confidential information from sponsoring corporations in certain circumstances.

"Rather than saying that students may not sign agreements to accept confidential information from sponsors, we just insist that the acceptance of confidential information not be of a kind that prevents the person from publishing or discussing their own research," Martin said.

If the legislation is approved by the full Faculty, students could accept such agreements with the approval of administrators and department Faculty.

Martin said that the change is designed to prevent the rules from getting in the way of legitimate research that doesn't conflict with University policy.

"It arose primarily from supervisors saying: 'I can't allow a student to work on this topic because of the rules and it makes no sense,'" he said.

The council also heard updates on several labor issues University officials worked on over the summer. While the council is not directly responsible for these University initiatives, it regularly hears progress reports on such projects.