SPARCS RUSH Agreement Processing Policy Now in Effect

Please note the new policy is in effect for all agreements and involves the following points:

• PINS has to be fully approved and routed to SPARCS to make the request.
• Agreement has to have a hard, justified deadline for execution with sponsor support of the deadline. 
• The deadline cannot be extended or mitigated by a pre-award account.

Non-Industry	Industry	Amendments/Mods
All Agreements: <15 business days until deadline	Standard Agreements (NC State templates, Task Orders under established Master Agreements, and sponsor templates that NC State has previously used): <15 business days until deadline. Non-Standard Agreements (New sponsor templates and altered NC State templates): <30 business days until deadline.	All Amendments/Mods to established agreements: <5 business days until deadline.

Once the above bullets are addressed, a SPARCS RUSH Agreement Request has to be submitted by CALS Pre-Award Team. 

Once submitted, below is the process per SPARCS:

Projects qualifying for RUSH processing will be prioritized over non-RUSH projects, but alongside other RUSH projects in the order in which the requests are received. Please be aware that SPARCS is likely to have multiple pending RUSH requests at any given time.

Submitting an agreement for RUSH processing does not, and cannot, guarantee that SPARCS will be able to meet the associated deadline. SPARCS only has control over half of the process of negotiating an agreement for execution, and can only make best efforts to use available resources to move the negotiation forward (e.g. reviewing the agreement for modification, providing feedback to the sponsor, etc.). Highly complex or lengthy agreements present additional challenges and may be difficult to accommodate. Investigators should inform SPARCS of an agreement or the need for an agreement at the earliest opportunity to increase the likelihood of an executed agreement ahead of the relevant deadline.

Please see the full policy at this link.