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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 OfficeTeacher 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

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