With recent updates to Person of Interest (POI) and Transfer complete, learn how teams worked together to make them a success and see how they’re planning for changes to Hire, Rehire, and Additional Job functionality that will take place in December.

What made the updates a success?

This project required a large amount of planning and collaboration from many different teams and departments around each campus, as well as the System office. 

The Cross-campus Team

System Administration project members and campus HR subject matter experts worked together as a 33 member Cross-campus Team. Beginning in October 2017, they spent between eight to 10 hours a week discussing and reviewing requirements and design decisions. This time requirement, in addition to the other work and support they provided to keep the project on track, totaled 5,280 hours.

Development and Communications

With the help of four primary developers and three HCM analysts, 1,430 hours went into development, 223 hours were spent on configuration and system integration testing took 824 hours.

Once the groundwork was laid, 12 blogs were published and 17 direct emails and newsletters were sent to users in an effort to help them understand the changes that were coming.

User Acceptance Testing and Training  

To work out any potential issues and ensure the upgraded items were ready for launch, two user acceptance testing cycles were conducted requiring 4,312 testing hours with 112 testers and 1,086 test cases.

Training provided extensive materials to guarantee users had the best experience using the newly upgraded features after they went live. This meant updating three Skillsoft courses and 12 documents to reflect system changes, hosting 26 training sessions across all campuses with 308 attendees, taking 530.5 hours to complete training.

This preparation and hard work led to a successful launch, indicated by in part by only three minor calls to the support center on the first day after launch.

To view additional information about the project’s results, click here. 

What’s next?

The Cross-campus Team has gathered lessons learned about what worked well with this upgrade and what needs improvement for the next phase. Topics include collaboration, verification and validation (a new step in the process), user acceptance testing, and implementation and support. With this information, an action plan is being produced for the next round of changes in December.

In addition to this reviewing and planning, teams have begun shifting their focus to the December upgrade, which will replace ePAR forms with delivered functionality for the following processes:

• Additional job
• Hire
  • Direct student, faculty, and staff hires
  • Contract pay hires
  • Applicant Tracking System hires
• Rehire
  • Direct student, faculty, and staff rehires
  • Contract pay rehires
  • Applicant Tracking System rehires

These changes will continue to streamline the user experience, reduce the amount of maintenance required, further stabilize and enhance the system and allow users to more effectively perform their business functions.

Updates and additional information on the next phase of the project will be provided in upcoming months.