ARCHIVED: Completed project: Personnel Information Environment CRUST

Primary UITS contact: Jason Francis

Completed: September 15, 2010

Description: This project leverages the success of the Personnel Information Environment (PIE) to make it useful for other IU units and campuses.

The PIE provides comprehensive services that enable the supervision of a large number of part-time hourly staff by a few professional employees, decreasing the cost of site and lab management while improving service. The CRUST project removes items from PIE that are particular to UITS, resulting in a tool that can be used by other groups in differing environments.

The current version of the PIE has a steep learning curve, and hundreds of potentially confusing features (many of them deprecated). In this project we plan to prune away as many features as possible, until what is left is a more intuitive and easy-to-adopt application.

Outcome: CRUST will be simple to deploy and use by other IU units. It will bring the proven features of PIE to a wider audience, and in some areas offers improvements over its parent system. These features include:

• A highly flexible scheduling system, allowing for shift substitutions between hourly employees
• An integrated time clock to track consultants' activities
• Real-time supervisor tools to monitor shifts' status and identify sites in need of attention
• A meetings feature for scheduling consultant meetings, which handles attendance and the corresponding timesheets
• Project hours for independent tasks
• A timesheet section for tracking an employee's hours and punctuality
• Payroll tools for budget tracking
• Observation tools for consultants and sites, with the ability to add other observation types as needed
• A mentor system to foster each consultant's growth
• A performance record detailing an employee's entire career

The project will also directly benefit the PIE by improving the following areas:

• More robust subnetting, allowing for better awareness of consultants' behavior in sites
• A more flexible Hourly Action Form (HAF) system that allows for use of multiple accounts
• Clarification of which accounts will pay for which shifts
• Easier editing of items which, presently, must be changed directly in the database
• Central Authentication Service integration
• A considerable amount of documentation so others can use this application on their own

Milestones and status:

Phase I - July 2009 Completed

Create a core PIE consisting of a scheduling section, personnel section, admin menu, and time clock

• Scheduling section
  • Availability templates, preferably in IUPUI's 24-hour format
  • Shifts in progress
  • Schedule utilities
    • Insert/edit semesters
    • Initialize schedule for next semester
    • Set lab hours
    • Holiday scheduling
    • All consultants schedule
  • View breaks
  • Missed shifts report
• Personnel section
  • Employee personnel information
  • Personnel reports - only applicable ones
  • HAFs - much more general than ours
    • For new hires, require a valid username
    • Add/edit accounts to pay from
    • Add/edit schedule roles, and bind them to an account
    • Create HAF
      • Use the IUPUI "select an account" model
      • Make supervisor field editable
• Admin menu
  • PIE administration
    • Site/lab menu
    • Subnets - there will need to be major revisions
    • Roles menu
    • HAF justifications
  • Authentication logs
• Time clock
  • Clocking in
  • Clocking out
  • Taking a break
  • Moves

Phase II - August-September 2009 Completed

Timesheet functionality will be added, including the manual editing and creation of timesheets, a universal XML export of timesheet data for payroll, and the pertinent reports from the Admin Menu.

• Timesheets: Allow authorized users to revise current check-ins from Shifts In Progress, edit completed ones from the Timesheet Menu, and create them as well. Features to include from Timesheet Menu:
  • Search timesheet records (timesheet_record.cfm)
  • Add a timesheet record
  • Shift details report
• Admin reports
  • Checkin reports
    • Added checkin
    • Edited checkin
    • Deleted checkin
    • Wrong lab checkins
  • Payroll, timesheet, and budget reports
    • Replace link Launch Payroll Application with Download Payroll XML
    • Budget: summary and full report; this will take some effort to make them handle multiple accounts gracefully
    • Employee payroll reports: summary and full report; again, this will need to handle multiple accounts gracefully

Phase III - October-December 2009 Completed

Add shift substitution features to the schedule, tools for handling meetings, and project hours. Also add the features from the Control Panel, rewriting large sections to simplify management of observations entered by employees.

• Schedule features
  • Shift substitutions
    • Add the Bid/Post page and the stored procedures that drive it
    • Add the Post a Sub page
    • Add the Bid on a Sub page
    • Add unstaffed shift sub posting
    • Add Approve Subs page
  • Project hours
    • Add tools for assigning and editing project hours
    • Revise tools to handle multiple accounts
    • Add project hours reporting tools
  • Meeting menu
    • Add tools for scheduling a meeting and selecting attendees
    • Revise tools to handle multiple accounts
    • Reports for completed meetings
• Control panel
  • Rewrite the Edit Question page so that users can completely control all observation types
  • Seed the initial observation types
    • Consultant Observation: observation of a consultant staffing a site
    • Mentor Observation: written comments about a consultant's development
    • Site Observation: information about the state of an unstaffed site
    • Praise & Recognition: used to praise meritorious behavior from a consultant
    • Misconduct: used to record incidents of misconduct by consultants
  • Revise reports to handle user-created observation types
  • Add the Performance Record to show a consultant's history for the current semester at a glance
  • To-Dos
    • Used to assign a one-time or recurring task to a consultant or site
    • Add creation and editing tools for To-Dos
    • Add a to-do reminder to the Time Clock
  • Mentoring
    • Add tools to assign supervisors as mentors to a group of consultants
    • Add reports to track the mentor's visits with their mentees

Phase IV - January-February 2010 Completed

CRUST has been set up for Tom Prinz at IUS, using the Consolidated Hosting Environment. After dialing in a few specific settings for IUS, CRUST progressed rapidly through a testing phase, and is now in production use by IUS consultants.

During this rollout, a long-standing bug in the Time Clock was found and fixed, for both CRUST and PIE. Additionally a new report was created to identify shift substitutions that go unclaimed.

Phase V - March-May 2010

The main finding from the IUS rollout is that CRUST could be made more useful by improved integration with the HRMS and TIME systems. An investigation is being made into this integration so that other interested parties within IU can move to CRUST with a minimum of hassle.

Comment process: Comments will be solicited during Phase IV trials. Early adopters will contact Jason Francis directly.

Benefits:

• By utilizing the current code base, this project will provide a comprehensive management tool that can be used by other IU campuses and departments at very little cost.
• The oldest sections of PIE were written in 1999. Work on the CRUST project provides a chance to revise several sections to take advantage of advances in technology. Additionally, testing each section of CRUST allowed for detailed, technical documentation to be written.

Project team:

• Jason Francis
• Marsha Egan
• Sue Perin