Weekly Update for the Week of March 18, 2013

Oracle to release key software

ESUP Program Director Andy Hill announced on Monday, Oracle has confirmed at the Alliance Conference that the Human Capital Management (HCM) and Finance 9.2 software will finally be released.  This software release had originally been scheduled for December 2012, and the delay was seen as a potential risk for ESUP. Now the program will be able to proceed with the solid target of implementing these two modules. The HCM software is seen as a significant improvement, especially in terms of usability.

ESUP will move forward as quickly as possible to adopt the 9.2 environment in redesigning HR business processes. The Finance work stream's later start date works out extremely well with the timing of this software release. This is great news, as these products are critical to ESUP’s technical strategy and timeline. 

Design Thinking Workshops Begin to
Shape the Vision of Portal

ESUP's Portal project has forged a partnership with the College of Design. By taking advantage of the College’s cutting edge design practices, Portal is demonstrating how ESUP can engage with University academic resources to produce excellent outcomes.

So far 75 people from the Morris and Twin Cities campuses have attended one of the system-wide Design Thinking@College of Design workshops, creating 15 prototypes that explore specific features users want from the portal. The responses so far show appreciation for an open and inclusive process. After each workshop, attendees receive a survey as an additional opportunity to provide feedback. The current survey completion rate is over 70%!

More information, including pictures and videos of the prototypes built so far, can be found on the Portal website.   Click on the Design Thinking Workshop tab.
Upcoming Design Thinking workshops (more workshop dates available online):

• Tuesday, March 28: 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. [http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5542999260] Duluth, Kirby Student Center - Room 310
• Tuesday, April 9: 9 a.m. - 12 p.m. [http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5543075488]
  Rochester, University Square - Room 417 
• Wednesday, April 10: 9 a.m. - 12 p.m. [http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5537978242]
  Twin Cities, Conference Center - Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs - Room 180

Best practice guidelines for analyzing gaps

CedarCrestone has developed a set of best practices to help guide the scope of issues addressed during Interactive Design and Prototyping (IDP) sessions. These guidelines are designed to help IDP participants focus on large and meaningful business process design issues. The following relatively small customizations have downstream impacts that increase maintenance costs, but they may not deliver sufficient business value to merit attention during IDP :

• Field Edits -- (validates the content or format of a field value)
• Field Defaults  -- (pre populates a value in a field)
• Field Location -- (where a field appears on the page)
• Labels -- (names a field on the page)
• Tab Order -- (the order that the tab button moves the cursor through fields or links on a page)
• Search settings -- (search parameters such as “include history”)

While there may be exceptions to this practice, most of these items will be left as delivered by PeopleSoft. This should help IDP teams to move forward and focus on larger and more meaningful business process redesign issues.

OHR Explores Vision, Strategy for Portal Implementation

More than 20 members of the Office of Human Resources (OHR), the Portal work stream, University Services, the College of Liberal Arts on the Twin Cities campus, and University of Minnesota Duluth met last Wednesday to begin to develop a vision and implementation strategy for dynamic new human resources content and functionality, which will emerge over the next few years with the implementation of the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal as part of ESUP.

The half-day session, led by Vice President Kathy Brown, Director of HR Operations Lori Lamb, and the retreat facilitator, Sue Gebelein, included brainstorming of short- and long-term goals for HR content and functionality in the portal, as well as a discussion of the foundational work and leadership required to prepare OHR staff, processes, and content for a new portal environment.

“It was a great day,” Lamb said. “It’s exciting to see the great potential of a new HR portal to really transform the way faculty and staff interact with the University and to convey our employment brand. At the same time, I think everyone agreed that the success of ESUP overall will determine how transformational the HR portal can be. What we do between now and 2014 to upgrade technology, streamline business processes, and improve HR data, reporting, and content will determine how much of our dream portal can be realized.”

Campus Schedules Diverge

Next Friday Morris, Rochester, and Twin Cities will be closed, but Duluth and Crookston are open. Please double-check your schedule to see if you have ESUP-related meetings on this date.

Quick Hits and Reminders From Across the Work Streams

• The Finance work stream continues to plan for its project kickoff in May. The Functional Steering Committee and the business process owners spent time discussing the list of financial business processes. This resulted in identifying each business process as 'customer facing' or 'central facing' to plan who will need to be involved for each session. The project team is scheduling the Finance work stream Phase 1: Plan & Discover meetings for May through August.
• The Student work stream: Due to the holiday closure of three campuses on March 22, the Student Records team will not hold a Town Hall meeting that day. The next Student Records Town Hall will be held April 12. More information about Town Hall meetings can be found on the Student Records Stakeholder Engagement page.
• The Technology work stream:  Developers continue to attend and assist in work stream IDP sessions as needed.
• The Portal work stream is out and about talking to people about the future of portal, answering questions, and getting great input to help shape this technology. Recently, Portal has met with University Relations, the Senate Committee on Information Technology, and the Faculty Consultative Committee, just to name a few. Click here to provide your feedback and/or arrange for a meeting with your department or college.
• The Reporting and Data Management work stream:    Information gathering sessions for the BI Roadmap effort concluded this past week.  Interviews and discovery sessions were conducted across the University, meeting with over 150 people. Interview representation included:  University Analysts, Analytics Collaborative, Data Governance Team, distributed developer communities, Office of Institutional Research, members from the System Campuses, Financial Report Working Group, RRC Managers, Collegiate Chief of Staffs, representation from central functional groups (HR, Student, Finance), University units with existing BI systems, and Office of Information Technology.
  
  Over the next two weeks the information will be compiled, analyzed, and provided to EDMR to provide direction in enhancing the skills, processes, technologies, applications and user support for BI services that better meet the needs of University stakeholders.