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Office of Institutional Research

Month: February 2015

Winter 2015 — Cycle 4

Work Planned

03/02/2015 — 03/13/2015

  • Grants
  • Person
  • Test scores

Work Complete

Grants

  • Search tool for grants database
  • Breadcrumb trail for better navigation
  • Space for agency tracking number and Grants.gov number
  • Download grants report to spreadsheeet
  • Grants import cleanup routines, merge duplicate faculty records
  • Refine columns on report views

Person

Once we got started on the Person database it became clear our plans need further refining. We regrouped and made excellent progress on setting up the data repository and building the connections to UW authoritative data. Right now this is still in progress on the development server. Work will continue in Cycle 5.

  • Plan person repository (DEV)
  • Import person population using existing information system user lists (DEV)
  • Fill out person record identifier fields from UW data warehouse (DEV)

Test Scores

  • Collect sample data
  • Identify data sources

Business Operations

  • Refine interface edit and update options

Infrastructure and Bugs

  • Bug: Appreview email notifications
  • Bug: STEP missing advisees on advisor page
  • Bug: Courses tagging problem
  • Laravel framework test run
  • Web server backup issues resolved

Planned Work Not Complete

  • Grants about page – content still under review
  • Person views and search – planned for Cycle 5
  • Person grants permissions – planned for Cycle 5
  • Person STEP permission – planned for Cycle 5

 

Winter 2015 – Cycle 3

02/16/2015 — 02/27/2015

Work Planned

  • Grants – sponsor info and views
  • Courses – comments & bugs
  • Recruitment – email
  • Business Ops Ticket System
  • Applicant Review – user management, local data
  • Infrastructure

Work Complete

Grants

  • Normalize person data, support local person records
  • Refine grant views to emphasize useful information
  • Display originating sponsor and sponsor contact information
  • Edit and delete due dates
  • Calculate grant end date
  • Data research PAC, payment type, budget end date
  • UW “boundless” theme, compressed header, more mobile friendly
  • Forms style refined cleaner, mobile improvements, more data hints

Courses

  • Comments on offerings
  • Expected flag for offerings created by repetition rules
  • Bug differs from UWTS
  • Bug historical, lock edits

Recruitment

  • Finalize one-off bulk email tool
  • Delete old/empty groups
  • Production code brought into version control

Business Ops Ticket System

  • Edit travel request form to add note fields for each $ item
  • Update text on personal travel question
  • Move “Amount Capped” fields to Financial fields and make editable only by fiscal staff
  • Edit form locking functionality based on status fields
  • Update text on personal travel question

Infrastructure

  • PHP 5.5 on production
  • Create requirements gathering document/checklist
  • Version control setup and documentation

Winter 2015 – Cycle 2

02/02/2015 — 02/13/2015 = Grants and infrastructure

Work Planned

  • Grants
  • Due dates
  • Bizops
  • Infrastructure
  • Refine and document development process

Work Complete

Bizops

  • Webservice code fixed for person lookup
  • Supervisor Approver labels
  • Populated People
  • Linked reference docs, PowerPoint
  • Multiple adds to field

Grants

  • Entity details page for proposal, person, award
  • Due dates
  • IRB approvals
  • Fiscal contacts
  • Authorization system
  • Reports by PI, Researcher, Fiscal contacts
  • Report upcoming due dates, 60 day, 90 day, by person
  • Grants with no fiscal contact
  • Grants moved to production, linked from My COE > Databases

Students

  • Added PESB experience type

Recruitment

  • One off email edits – constructing a tool to allow recruiters to email different audiences in one bulk email.
  • One off email edits – Include regions based on zip codes to tool
  • One off emails – adjust tool interface is more useable (select menus)

Infrastructure

  • Patched Ghost bug
  • Built PHP 5.5 sandbox and tested, moved to development server, Drupal testing
  • Fixed HtmlToText library
  • Merged server code into version control
  • Version control documentation

Bug fixes

  • TA/RA not authorized in Help Desk ticket system
  • SWS v4 retired
  • Applicant review text encoding bugs
  • Recruitment duplicate email bug

Launched COE Institutional Research blog

  • About Agile and Epics
  • Planning dates

Requirements, Stories & Epics

Good requirements are critical to building quality software efficiently. Having shared strategies to define and document requirements helps users, subject matter experts, and developers build a shared understanding of what is needed.

Stories

User stories are a strategy for describing requirements for a small contained feature. By convention stories include a role, an action, and a reason.

As an AST I need the ability to see who changed a course plan record and when so I can resolve discrepancies correctly.

Ideally stories describe distinct deliverable functionality that can be translated to development projects which can be completed with a development cycle.

Epics

Stories will vary in size and scope. Big stories describe general needs and (hopefully) can be broken down into smaller addressable stories.

We refer to the top level stories as Epics. Epics may never be “done”, they can describe ongoing needs. Epics provide a way to describe overall organizational needs and give us a tool for prioritizing at high levels.

Prioritizing Epics and Stories and Work

We prioritize epics to develop a shared understanding of the goals and needs of the organization. We develop stories that describe contained achievable goals that support the epics. We map the stories to projects, units of work that can be achieved during a development cycle.

Those projects are prioritized on many factors including…

  • importance of the epic
  • importance of the story
  • real world dates, events, and deadlines
  • immediate value provided
  • risk reduction
  • ready to be worked on, dependencies are satisfied
  • size of project, easier to schedule small contained projects

Karen and Paul will draft these priorities and then seek feedback in our cycle planning meetings.

A great article describing “story” and “epic” terminology”

http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/stories-epics-and-themes

Epics

Epics describe the top level goals and projects of the college for information system development. We’ve proposed a prioritized list of how urgent these epics are to the college, but we will seek feedback about this prioritization in face-to-face meetings including our quarterly roadmap planning meeting. This list and the priority order will continue to be refined.

Urgency level of epics is an important factor in prioritizing work for development cycles, but other factors including completeness of requirements, due dates, dependencies and organizational risk are considered.

Bullet points are example projects to help explain the epic, they are not a complete list of work to be done on a given epic.

1. Grants

College needs a shared location for grant information to clarify support staff and keep deadlines visible.

  • Fiscal support staff review
  • Due date reporting
  • Grants budget reporting

2. Meet Reporting Requirements

College needs to be able to respond to external reporting requirements to meet legal obligations, retain credentials, for program improvement, and to receive recognition.

  • Database for test scores from various sources tied to applicant and student data with verification workflow
  • Create tools for certification officer to comply with OSPI recommendation requirements
  • Teacher education online assessment forms
  • PESB data manual
  • Refine applications to support PESB requirements

3. HR/Payroll

College needs tools to support HR and payroll processes.

  • Way to capture large budget encumbrances (e.g. faculty salary)
  • Implement new hire forms and workflow as part of a request system

4. Reporting and Information Dashboards

College needs to have usable and understandable access to the data in our information systems.

  • Tableau dashboards for information system

5. Fiscal Business Operations

College needs tool for organized submission and tracking of fiscal business operations request to insure completeness and provide visibility of progress.

  • Implement fiscal forms in business operations ticket system (starting with travel and purchasing)
  • Link forms to other relevant systems

6. Better Use of Applicant Data

College needs to retain and fully utilize applicant data for advising, program evaluation and reporting. Currently much of our applicant data is provided by the Graduate School and after a time we lose access to it.

  • Eliminate outages due to back end downtime
  • Undergraduate applications and online review
  • Ability to evaluate selection process by program
  • Attach applicant data to student record to support advising

7. Authoritative Person Data

College needs shared authoritative resource for information about people. Person data should integrate official UW data wherever possible.

  • Support HR and Payroll work flows, easier onboarding and offboarding of employees
  • Reduce administration across information systems, better access management
  • Data more consistent and up-to-date across systems

8. Course Planning

College needs tools to expose a shared plan for curriculum and course scheduling. Courses need to be staffed and mapped to funding. Course scheduling needs to be timely and accurate.

  • Program curriculum grids represented in Courses Database
  • Faculty teaching expectations and load accurately represented

9. Program Management & Advising

College needs tools to administer and report on academic programs and individual students.

  • Track certification and endorsement programs
  • OSS online petitions

10. Infrastructure Improvements

College information system infrastructure must run smoothly and efficiently so less effort is required on maintenance more attention can be paid to new features and improvements.

  • Upgrade servers to PHP 5.5
  • Migrate applications to shared infrastructure
  • Create connections to UW central data to simplify data updates

 

Planning Dates

This list shows the dates of our two week development cycles and where the quarterly planning meetings will fall into place.

2015 Winter Quarter

  • Cycle 1: 01/19/2015 – 01/30/2015 – theme is grants and infrastructure
  • Cycle 2: 02/02/2015 – 02/13/2015 – theme is grants and infrastructure
  • Cycle 3: 02/16/2015 – 02/27/2015
  • Cycle 4: 03/02/2015 – 03/13/2015

2015 Spring Quarter

Quarterly roadmap planning meeting – March 3, 2015

  • Cycle 5: 03/16/2015 – 03/27/2015
  • Cycle 6: 03/30/2015 – 04/10/2015
  • Cycle 7: 04/13/2015 – 04/24/2015
  • Cycle 8: 04/27/2015 – 05/08/2015
  • Cycle 9: 05/11/2015 – 05/22/2015
  • Cycle 10: 05/25/2015 – 06/05/2015
  • Cycle 11: 06/08/2015 – 06/19/2015
  • Cycle 12: 06/22/2015 – 07/03/2015

2015 Summer Quarter

Quarterly roadmap planning meeting – July 3, 2015

  • Cycle 13: 07/06/2015 – 07/17/2015
  • Cycle 14: 07/20/2015 – 07/31/2015
  • Cycle 15: 08/03/2015 – 08/14/2015
  • Cycle 16: 08/17/2015 – 08/28/2015
  • Cycle 17: 08/31/2015 – 09/11/2015
  • Cycle 18: 09/14/2015 – 09/25/2015
  • Cycle 19: 09/28/2015 – 10/09/2015
  • Cycle 20: 10/12/2015 – 10/23/2015

2015 Autumn Quarter

Quarterly roadmap planning meeting – October 15

  • Cycle 21: 10/26/2015 – 11/06/2015
  • Cycle 22: 11/09/2015 – 11/20/2015
  • Cycle 23: 11/23/2015 – 12/04/2015
  • Cycle 24: 12/07/2015 – 12/18/2015
  • Cycle 25: 12/21/2015 – 01/01/2016
  • Cycle 26: 01/04/2016 – 01/15/2016

 

Tech Support

The Tech Support Ticket system is available to faculty, students, and staff of the UW College of Education. If you should have access to this system contact the COE Help Desk.

Website URL: https://education.uw.edu/techsupport/

Purpose

The client interface of the Tech Support Ticket system allows faculty, students, and staff of the UW College of Education to make technology support requests and equipment reservation requests. The portal allows users to see their open and resolved tickets and add additional information.

The Tech office interface provide ticket administration ability including reporting. It also features an equipment database, a reservation search & availability system and and online checklist for classroom technology review.

Features

  • Support ticket creation and tracking.
  • Equipment database and equipment reservation system.
  • Classroom technology checklist.

Users

  • All COE faculty, students, staff – best way to request help desk support
  • COE tech staff for managing support, sharing information on cases, managing equipment reservations

Students

The Student database (STEP) is a student advising tool available to faculty and staff in the College of Education. If you need access to this system, contact the COE Help Desk.

Website URL: https://education.uw.edu/step/

Purpose

The student database supports College of Education program operations such as advising and reporting on current (and past) students in the college. STEP is the authoritative record of student, practicum placement data (student teaching, practicum, internships), OSPI certification, and advisor relationships. STEP also keeps track of doctoral student degree milestones. We utilize authoritative data sources where possible in STEP, example student lists, student contact information, student demographics and student course registration. This data is imported from authoritative sources via import or web services.

Features

  • Student lists by program, cohort, advisor. Student contact information.
  • Access to UW student transcript data.
  • Record of student placements
  • Record of teaching certificate recommendations to OSPI and certificate numbers
  • Degree milestone tracking for doctoral students including committee membership
  • Customized report views to support college workflows

Users

  • Faculty use STEP in advising their students.
  • OSS and Academic Support Team maintain local student data through STEP web interface.
  • Several programs including Teacher Education Program use STEP to track placements including student teaching and internships
  • Institutional Research uses STEP extensively for providing specific reporting to leadership and faculty and for required reporting in program accreditation.

Recruitment

The Recruitment data­base is an inter­nal tool avail­able to fac­ulty and staff in the Col­lege of Edu­ca­tion who work with prospective students. If you need access to this sys­tem, con­tact the COE Help Desk.

Web­site URL: https://education.uw.edu/recruitment/

Purpose

Recruitment database is a custom built customer relationship management system for COE prospective students. It stores contact information and prospect interests. The system provides tools for automated email communication based on interests. It also allows for one off custom email. The system has one main public interface, an About Yourself “Half Sheet” (named for a half page form we used to take to events).

Features

  • Public form accessible from main COE website where prospective students can add their own contact information and register interests with specific programs.
  • Email system for communication with prospects that supports templated messages and keeps a shared log of interactions.
  • Ability to create automated email communication campaigns based on prospect interests.
  • Ability to generate reports to use prospect lists in other contexts.

Users

  • Prospective students – About Yourself half-sheet is a public form linked from the main college website. It is regularly utilized we get about 20 prospects self-registering per week, rate fluctuating through school year.
  • OSS – Office of Student Services replies to questions asked by prospective students. Marty Howell works with Development office to plan automated email communications.
  • OMRR – Office of Minority Recruitment and Retention uses system to track and communicate with candidates.

Applicant Review

The Applicant Review database is an internal tool available to faculty and staff in the College of Education involved in application review. If you need access to this system, contact the COE Help Desk.

Website URL: https://education.uw.edu/a/appreview/

Purpose

The Student Online Applicant Review System (nicknamed SOARS) is a system to allow College faculty committees to review application files, record admission decisions, and recommend students for scholarship review. Students apply through the Grad School’s MyGrad application and the materials are then passed to the College's Applicant Review database. The Applicant Review database provides visibility on file review progress, allows for additional application materials not supported by Grad School, and provides evaluation rubrics.

Features

  • Secure online availability of application files to faculty reviewers.
  • Centralized record of application materials, completeness, and decisions.
  • Ability to build custom review rubrics and apply to applicants by program.

Users

  • Office of Student Services (OSS) does preliminary review of applications for completeness, email applicants from the system about completeness and decisions, and communicates final decisions from our system to the Grad School.
  • Faculty review applications and enter their decisions (called recommendations in system to differentiate from final consensus decisions).
  • Academic support team manage review committees, enter consensus decisions and assign initial advisors.