How to Fire People Using SharePoint

Editor's Notes

• #3: Welcome everyone. I’m Sandra Mahan. So a little about who am I? Let’s actually start off with who I’m not: I’m not a vendor and I’m not here to sell you anything. I’m a power user who has learned some cool tricks that I want to be able to share with other power users. My goal is to help out other people in the same boat as I am. I work for a large insurance company in the pacific northwest and I’ve been in Human Resources for over 20 years now. I’ve worked in many areas within HR such as benefits, payroll, hiring and firing, employee wellness, metrics and analytics and now technology. For a short stint I was even an AS/400 programmer. Recently I transitioned to IT and became the Lead for the SharePoint Team. Today I’m going to be talking about a few of the applications we’ve created for Human Resources using InfoPath and SharePoint. I prefer having an interactive session so feel free to ask questions during my presentation. I’m sure that if you have the question, someone else is probably wondering the same thing.
• #4: Ok, this session isn't really about firing employees. It's about taking inefficient manual processes and automating them using out-of-the-box functionality available within SharePoint. I'll explain how we reduced a process that involved 23 employees throughout the company to one employee doing the work on a part-time basis. This real world example of how we accomplished this amazing feat will be explained in detail so that you too can turn your business customers into your biggest SharePoint evangelists and provide them with the power and know-how to maintain the solution on an ongoing basis. So yes, the title of this session is a little misleading. I'm not proposing that you take this back to your management team and tell them you learned how to fire a bunch of employees and save the company tons of money by using SharePoint. I just want to walk you through a system we built that reduced the workload of several individuals so that they could have the time back to focus on other areas of work.
• #6: Now forget everything I just said about what URAC is and why we did this. It’s not really important to what we’re talking about but just wanted to provide you with the basic understanding. Please don’t think I'm going to talk you through all the inner workings of what it is and why we do it. It's just a project like any others you all might be working on. The focus of my session is to give you ideas of ways that you can influence or change the projects you're working on.
• #7: So just to give you a little background about the way this project was structured initially and I'm sure you'll find some correlation to projects that are currently being done in your own company. We had 23 employees all over the company tracking information about employees in their area. They would track this information on an Excel spreadsheet and with hard copy documents.   There are approximately 750 employees working under the scope of URAC at any given time. It changes daily with new hires, terminations, promotions, lateral moves between URAC and non URAC positions etc. URAC requires that we are ALWAYS in a state of readiness and they can announce an audit with as little as 5 days advance notice.   Current process: The current process of identifying a URAC employee, creating a folder on the T drive, collecting all required documentation depending on the position and maintaining the documentation in a “State of URAC Readiness” at all times requires approximately 7.0 FTEs. The unseen effort is the risk associated with trying to manage all of the steps listed above manually when some of the documentation (Primary Source Verification (PSV)) must meet the strict rule of zero tolerance as indicated by URAC. There are strict rules associated with PSV and anything less than adhering to these rules to perfection would downgrade our URAC accreditation.
• #9: Create interfaces to each system but there would still be manual work for someone? Where to start? Worried about firewall connections, etc. Start small and tell them phase 2 effort once everything is up and running. The requirements weren’t fully outlined. If data isn’t pulled correctly then they would say SharePoint wasn’t working.
• #10: Although not all current manual processes will be automated, enough process will be automated to allow for requirements to be managed fully within HR with the same level of support from credentialing. There will also be some limited support from the 23 employees who support URAC for the 26 business areas impacted. The errors inherent in a fully manual process that are governed by strict rules will significantly decrease. Here are just a few examples of areas that will see significant improvement from automation (this is by no means an exhaustive list): Correct Job Code with the correct Job Description when someone moves from one dept. to another or receives a promotion Flagging JDs for clinical type and flagging individual employees in Lawson upon hire to keep “who falls under the scope of URAC” current at all time Being able to report against upcoming PSV expirations Being able to track non-clinical license and certification expiration dates (ex: driver’s licenses) Training reports coming from the LMS system URAC training being added to our internal systems instead of relying on an external vendor to report from)
• #12: Gathering requirements from non-technical people can be a challenging thing. Many of us have experienced it with great frustration. You ask them what they want and they go all over the place. First it should do this and then this and this and that. And then expect you to sprinkle your magic fairy dust over the whole thing and make it super intuitive. Or they say something like, “Just make it better”.
• #13: I've found that during the first brainstorming meeting, the best thing to do is sit back and listen. Ask some pointed questions along the way to gain better understanding but mostly keep quiet. I've tried in the past to interject suggestions or solutions as part of the discussion but their eyes /ears typically glaze over immediately. They don't get what I'm talking about because I'm the technical person. OneNote is a great place to take notes of your discussions. It's easy to take the notes and share screens as you're talking in order to get buy in from the customers and then once you're done meeting, you can easily e-mail the page to the participants. Kicked my programmer off the project because he was making things too complicated when the users were trying to define their requirements.
• #14: When do you need this by? Obvious question. Is this a temporary solution or long-term? If this is only going to last for 2 months while they build a new system, I might not build in amazing functionality. What is my migration path to the new “long-term” solution. How many items will you be entering each month? Will there be over 5,000 records. It might change my set up. What are the benefits of automating this or changing platforms? This is so that I can tell management later on what we were able to do. Or it's a great way to determine if 40 hours of my time is only going to reduce their work 10 minutes a month, is there an ROI. How many customers will be using the application?
• #15: How does the data get added to the system? Is it an Excel spreadsheet, I can build a pretty slick datasheet view where they can copy and paste the information in or is it just all free-typing where they key the data in directly? When something is added to the application, what should happen to it? Does it just sit there and people view the list of items or does it need to be send somewhere else? This is where I tell them about workflows and all the magic behind them and their eyes start to light up. Really, it can do that? Don't ask them if they need any workflows. That will just confuse most customers. Instead, ask them what happens after someone fills out the form. If they say something along the lines of, oh we take the hard copy, scan it into the system or we send it in distribution to xyz department or we print it out. Ask follow up questions to gain better understanding. Can you tell me a little more about why you do that? Then ask them what if we automated that process? For example, as soon as the form was submitted electronically, it would automatically email a copy of the key information to xyz department with a link back to the form for them to review and/or approve.
• #17: When building the solution, I like to start with the small pieces and build onto it from there. Sometimes the big picture can be overwhelming and complicated to design and may change as things start to develop. Start with an easy visual first. Mock up the form for the customers. Show them what it can look like. Don't build in all of the workflows and fancy stuff yet. Just get the basics out there. If your customers are like mine, I can tell them all about the solution I'm going to build for them. But they just don't get it until they can see it. If you have the ability, I recommend you build something simple for them to wrap their mind around. Then they can start to see the possibilities forming and start to see your vision. They also know that you're working on it. I met with a guy one time for a 1/2 hour. He showed me this Access database they were using and it was getting unwieldy and customers were unable to work from home and the company had decided to no longer support Access. The next day, I built him a prototype within an hour. He was thrilled and it helped me shape our future conversations. We were then able to get more into the details once he could understand where I was headed.
• #20: Now back to our question to the customer about how the data is going to get into the system. There are a wide variety of means to get the data. The customers could manually type it in which sometimes can mean errors. You could do a system interface which may require a lot backend IT support and connection pieces. Or most systems can usually generate an Excel spreadsheet for you. Now all you have to do is set up a datasheet view to copy and paste the data into. Your customers are happy because it saves them the manual entry and you didn't have to spend tons of time setting up the connection pieces to make sure everything interfaces correctly. Also incorrect data can point back to the other system producing the data, not SharePoint. You just have to make sure the columns are in the correct order and the correct data is input. Drop-down lists match the fields, dates are input correctly. We get a weekly generated file. It takes my customer 5 minutes a week to copy and paste the content into the system. If you need the system interface, make that a phase 2 component. Again, this gets something in front of your customers right away. Make sure and train your customers the correct way to upload to the datasheet view.
• #31: Item versioning was an option but we wanted to show all information to auditors if needed
• #32: Set it up in the list as a Multiple lines of text field Append Changes to Existing Text - Yes
• #33: This is an example of how it appears when you edit it in InfoPath. From here you can edit the formatting.
• #35: One of the requirements we had for this project was to bring in the most current job description for the employee. We have an alternate document library set up where there is a pdf or word document uploaded into the system. They wanted to bring that document over and attach it to one of these list items. There were a couple of problems with this. First, how would we know when an updated job description was added to the job description document library? Would you add a workflow to that document library that would reference this library and cycle through all the records to determine which of the 900 employees, needed to have the new attachment and how in the heck would you pass the attachment over and hook it up with that record. Second, if someone changed jobs which was reflected in our new system, would it go out and scan the hundreds of job descriptions to find the right match? Nightmare huh? Sometimes our customers think they need something but they really don't know the alternate options available to them. Can we say no to pieces of the request? Are they make or break items? Sometimes I have to or like to say no, that's not possible. And then when I come back with an alternate solution, they love it because I told them no but here's a workaround. So here's what we ended up doing Each of the job descriptions out there, have a job code tied to them. My new system, has everyone's job code listed as well. So all I needed was to create a url and pass the job code into it which created a link that we can just click on which will give us the most current job description for that employee all the time.
• #39: Personnel documents: This updates our master list but remains a separate document library that we connect together
• #44: Training history: This updates our master list but remains a separate list that we connect together
• #46: Sometimes your data is going to cause a workflow to error out. What you want to do is set up a way to know when that happens. Because it happens so infrequently, I have an alert going to the program administrator as well as myself.
• #47: I created views that show the workflows that are not 5-Complete or Blank since our system purges workflow history after a certain period of time. So that shows you the list of workflows but you can't set up an alert on that view. So here's what you do… Now when you get that alert in your inbox, you can easily go out to your view and see which record errored out and open up the workflow for more clues.
• #51: I like to have the alert sent immediately to both the admin and myself when new items are added.
• #52: We needed to make sure each employee had all the required documentation. We created a page view there those that were missing items were displayed. We also created another view for items that were expiring. This was out of scope but was a huge win for the team when we were able to track this because of SharePoint. This is something they didn't have in the old system.
• #60: At the end of all of this, do you want to be the only person out there that knows what this system does and where no one on your team or the administrator can troubleshoot issues? Of course not. You'd be stuck for every app you ever built. What you need to do is empower your business customer to maintain their own information. How do you do that? Give them the tools.
• #61: What I did was I built a simple page with links to everything the admin would need. I didn't expect them to go to View All Site content all the time and then figure out which list to go to for this and that. I gave them the control to update the page as needed. This is their "central administration" page so-to-speak.
• #62: I built an initial Admin Guide which when they learn new things and want to train others, they can easily modify the document on their own.
• #63: I also built a tech spec for my team so they know how to administer the system if something were to happen or it's a good tool for others to use if we ever have to convert it to a new platform.
• #64: Then ultimately make sure you train them on how to use the new system.