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Category: Work Reviews

Spring 2015 – Cycle 8

04/27/2015 — 05/08/2015

Work Planned

Over the last couple cycles we have been building out tools to look at people related to COE and what system authorizations they have been given and budget information. These tools have been made available to small SME groups to get feedback on how they should work and what data they should include. This cycle we are focusing on implementing the SME feedback and making the tools more generally available.

  • Budgets
  • Person
  • Bizops
  • Students
  • Recruitment
  • Infrastructure

Work Complete

We got through planned work ahead of schedule this cycle and were able to move forward some enhancements on the Tech Support Ticket DB. One exciting piece (in progress) is ingestion of email directly into ticket messages and workflow. This will greatly increase Help Desk ticket usability and will translate to our work on the Business Operations ticket system.

 Budgets

  • Budget search by budget numbers, PI, OrgCode, or fiscal contact
  • Log changes to budget assignments
  • Report showing last time budget report was generated
  • Separated budget views from person views
  • COE intranet context menu applied to Budgets and Person, will be applied to all COE databases
  • Moved to production

Business Operations

  • Construct “big picture” document for F&A Director and SMEs to review/update
  • Plan “ticket first” strategy to support generalized fiscal office support requests

Person

  • Research and document UW data authorization protocols
  • Plan use cases and authorization for Person, Authorization, Appointment data for all COE job roles

Recruitment

  • Added “admin” role for more granular permissions
  • Fixed email template validation and substitution for From:
  • Copy travel form function
  • Travel form input scrubbing to accept and clean $ sign

Students

  • Import Doctoral Committees from new Grad School file

Infrastructure

  • Migrated development environment to UW-IT hosted server, local dev server is shut down
  • Replace website certificates that were generating ugly warnings in Chrome
  • All info systems now log to Google Analytics
  • Revised info system authorizations protocol document

Help Desk Ticket Database

  • Edit value list for problem type and OS
  • Improve tools for managing reservations
  • Started system to allow clients to interact with tickets via email

Spring 2015 – Cycle 7

04/13/2015 – 04/24/2015

Work Planned

Person

  • Examine data sharing through COE info systems. Create workflows and documentation of policies and procedure COE info systems will follow.
    • How should CoE information systems given authorization
    • Is there a UW resource for authorization levels
    • What is regulated data (UW Policy, FERPA, etc.)
    • What is sensitive data

Budgets

  • User testing with Director of Finance and Administration
  • User testing/feedback with FOG+ (financial/operations staff from Miller and COE centers and Miller grants staff)

Business Operations Ticketing Database

  • Update $ fields in travel forms so entries including symbols (i.e. $) don’t affect the workflow

Recruitment

  • Build a delete button for groups
  • Fix the duplicate group creation bug
  • Update error messages for email templates that don’t include values in the subject or from fields

Spring 2015 – Cycle 6

03/30/2015 – 04/10/2015

We have a growing number of web based tools to support workflow and sharing information in the college. It is getting to the point where it is hard for faculty and staff to keep track of them all. We are looking for ways to consolidate portals, standardize interfaces and cross reference information so we can increase functionality while making the tools more approachable.

As we continue to build out tools that support operations by exposing UW institutional data we need to regularly check we are respecting relevant policies and protections. As our systems become more extensive we need meta-tools to document the data exposed and who has been given access.

Work Complete

Grants

  • About page
  • Review download awards – inconsistent with HTML view
  • Date picker, not enough years
  • Put load instructions in admin tab
  • Change fiscal year labels (FY2015 = July 1, 2014 – June 30, 2015)

Person

  • Examine data sharing through COE info systems. Create authorization rules for new person and budget data in the new COE information system.
  • Appointment data import from EDW and add public data to person detail page
  • Fix links to other info systems authorizations tools

Test Scores

  • Meet with test score stakeholders
  • Document/plan test score workflows
  • Design test score data store

Budgets

  • Import budget list and supporting fields from EDW
  • Tool to assign fiscal staff to a budget (with bulk helpers)
  • Demo and get feedback

Business Operations Ticketing Database

  • Review current architecture for integration with other systems
  • Develop approval workflow for business forms and plan user interface to match workflow

Courses

  • Missing course description bug fix

Applicant

  • Fix user permissions tool

Recruitment

  • Delete discovered groups (new bulk email tool makes this routine group creation unnecessary)

Spring 2015 — Cycle 5

03/16/2015 — 03/27/2015

Work Planned

  • Person Repository
  • Grants
  • Test Scores

Work Complete

Person Repository

  • Import population from users of all COE information systems
  • Import person details for population by querying EDW
  • View of all persons and their current authorization levels in COE information systems
  • Links to authorization tools in individual information systems
  • Create Grants authorization
  • Create STEP authorization
  • Implement UW NetID login and authorization on Room schedule tool
  • Person database deployed to production

Business Operations

  • Update layout of travel reimbursement form (2nd form)
  • Troubleshoot Grad Service Errors on Export
  • Fix search functionality
  • Fix status field so forms set to complete drop into history instead of pending
  • Make the ‘status’ and ‘assigned to’ fields always editable fields by fiscal staff
  • Create a view of the last month’s worth of submissions
  • Remove ‘update’ button in ‘direct report’ listing
  • Change submission listing column ‘title’ and ‘type’ to ‘form’
  • Updates to Travel Request Form (1st form) – delete asterisk, travel designation options, resize amount boxes, remove 3rd destination field and update text in 2nd destination field

Applicant Review

  • App Review bug – empty user
  • App Review – program change not represented in web service
  • Add Grad School status to csv export file in appreview
  • Faculty comments for scholarship, aggregate view

Test Scores

  • Meeting set with SMEs
  • Sample data created

Recruitment

  • Updated bulk email tool to narrow criteria for inclusion into email

 

Infrastructure

  • Provisioned UW-IT hosted dev environment
  • Implemented Laravel PHP framework
  • Tech office equipment inventory tool

Grants

  • Planned work missed, pushing to next cycle.

Spring Quarterly Roadmap Feedback

Below is a summary of the feedback received from our first quarterly roadmap meeting. Those present at the meeting included members of the Academic Staff Team, Fiscal and HR, Grants team, Office of Student Services, Technology Office, Teacher Education, Associate Dean.

Feedback solicited included information about subject matter experts and considerations for development with respect to the following four Epics:

Reporting and Information Dashboards

SMEs: Office of Student Services, Research Unit, Financial Staff, FOG+, AD’s (including Teacher Education Dean).

Considerations:

  • Ability for reporting/dashboards to be utilized across platform
  • Using data visualization software, Tableau as a solution?
  • Any need for public dashboards? Dynamic reports on CoE website
  • Applications reports: ways to select what info. you would like to pull for a report (name, gpa, email, etc.)
  • Dashboards (current enrollment info, application info, financial aid, support sources of?, enrollment in classes)

Grants

SMEs: Grants team, director admin/finance, AST (for helping w/submitting reimbursements, etc.), Faculty

Considerations:

  • Who is assigned to oversee a particular budget (Roberta, Alayna, Juan, Eric)
  • Pre and Post award staff need to access info
  • Place for staff to access basic info (current grants: PIs, budget #)
  • All Budget # download (fiscal assignment)
  • Info includes all funding types
  • Multiple eGC1#’s and budget #’s for one “Grant”
  • Update grant data daily vs monthly
  • Weigh pros vs cons to see if it adds more layer of system management vs workload reduction grant management when a new system is introduced
  • s/b budget database: pre award? post award: fiscal/budget owner, salary encumbrances, BN, PI + delegated approval person

Accreditation Reporting Requirements

SMEs: admissions staff, certification program staff, certification faculty program heads (school psych, L4L Danforth), edTPA coordinator, certification officer, TEP Directors (requirements + progress), AST lead, Patrick (connects to Professional Division Dean + Directors), TEP Recruiter

Considerations:

  • Strand data whenever possible
  • Flexible architecture (in case of future changes/additions from PESB)
  • Include admissions file+rubric data
  • The ability to pull reports of multiple data points (eg admissions rubrics and edTPA)
  • Export features so we can run reports
  • How do test scores get entered into database? Do we need staff to key data?
  • Transfer all application documents to S-TEP “profile” for program access
  • Include option for signature assessments (numeric + text data)
  • Customize report templates

HR/Payroll

SMEs: HR director, payroll coordinator, FOG+, Research Unit, Financial Managers

Considerations:

  • Connect courses with hiring/budgeting
  • Salary D-base & Forecasting should be its own epic
  • Salary encumbrances, Fiscal / Budget owner, Salary transfers, distribution
    • OSCTS
    • Distribution changes
    • Approval
  • Is there a need for supervisors/managers to have any of this info?

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 spreadsheet
  • 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