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As the administrative needs of faculty and staff evolve, the University Initiatives Office team continues to collaborate with service providers, offering expertise and delivering solutions to transform services and ensure positive user experiences for the university community. 

We would like to share some of the progress that has been made with the current projects in the Continuous Administrative Service Improvement Program (CASIP).

(If you were unable to join us for the CASIP Town Hall last November, you may watch the recording here. We are working diligently to follow up on more of your questions and address other items from that discussion.)

HR Stream

Oracle Recruitment - The project is currently in the design and build phase with a test environment being configured for quality assurance and user feedback. There will be more opportunities to simplify recruitment projects by leveraging Oracle’s automation tools. This will enable hiring managers to focus on finding the best candidates rather than being burdened with myriad administrative tasks ultimately providing a better experience for both candidates and hiring managers. Full implementation and deployment of Oracle Recruitment to end users can be expected by June 30, 2025.

Graduate Student Appointments - Discovery sessions with select faculties have been completed to gather insights on the various tools currently in place to manage over 17,000 yearly graduate student appointments. The team has formulated an assessment criteria to evaluate improvement options. The primary outcome of this work is a redesigned process using one technology with a focus on end-to-end service delivery. Success factors include improved consistency, efficiency, and compliance with the Graduate Student Association collective agreement requirements and, ultimately, a better overall experience with the appointments process. Following a pilot phase, full implementation is expected by September 2025. 

HR Forms and Checklists - The objective of this project is to improve the ease of use and standardization of HR forms. User feedback shows the need for forms that are easier to access, fill out and submit. The updated forms will have less redundancy and more dynamic fields and clearer instructions to reduce both completion and processing time. This work will be done in batches, each requiring a period of review, development, user testing and approvals before the improved forms are released on the HR Forms and Documentation search page (Alfresco). 

The project will be near completion, with 94 forms reviewed and improved, by March 20, 2025. For the duration of the project, updates to forms will be tracked using an HR Forms & Checklists Improvement Log which can be accessed on the CASIP HR stream webpage. 

Recruitment Pilot - The recruitment pilot launched in February 2024 and there have been 255 requests for enhanced services from in-scope hiring managers since. It has enabled a more fulsome and thorough hiring process. Clients have spoken about its positive impact including one academic advisor commenting that their Recruitment Services Advisor was extremely helpful and the support saved them a tremendous amount of time but it also made them feel less “out of depth” with tasks that are not their expertise. Another hiring manager, a Faculty Director, shared his impressions saying that “it was one of the best sets of interviews that (he’s) ever participated in during (his) 15 years at the university”. 

Read here about how the pilot’s success has led to an expanded recruitment offering to managers hiring for NASA support roles Grade 7 and higher. 

Later in Q4 of 2024-2025, we will assess how we can transition from the recruitment pilot model to making the enhanced services available more widely.

Technology Stream - Application Rationalization 

This project is an assessment of opportunities to standardize applications across the university and identify ones that are suitable for centralization, migration or retirement. 

The work is underway in 23 faculties and university-wide service portfolios, and engagements will continue with outstanding areas. Nearly 1,600 technologies have been evaluated of which 140 have been identified as unused applications and are now in various stages of being decommissioned. 

Learn more about application rationalization here and also see which areas, so far, have been engaged in the project. 

Information Governance and Reporting Stream - Cloud Migration 

A large amount of institutional data, including financial data and student and staff data, is being moved from its current physical storage locations to “the cloud”. At the end of September 2024, the team successfully completed the quality assurance stage for financial data and moved that set to the cloud. Expected outcomes include faster and easier access to data. For example, reports, such as the undergraduate student application report (our first product that was moved to the cloud), used to be updated once per week but is now updated every day translating to less waiting time for users that need the information within a short timeline. 

Course data is currently being moved to the cloud and associated products will be released to the community in Spring 2025.

Research Administration Stream

This program stream is focused on strengthening support for the research community by developing solutions that enable timely, value-driven administrative services that are centered on researchers' needs and enabling the university’s core business of research. The goal is to establish an integrated administrative service model, with defined service pathways and delivery structures across the VPRI office, USOF, colleges, and stand-alone faculties to enable seamless support for researchers at every stage of the research journey. 

The voice of the researcher will be at the heart of this work, with researchers as co-creators of solutions. The first step is to systematically address challenges in research finance, looking at issues from a researcher's lens for: timely funding access, effective fund utilization and grant management. 

Preliminary engagements continue, with more to be scheduled in the new year in order to determine next steps. 

Finance Stream

In October, Finance, Procurement and Planning (FPP) modernized the Chart of Accounts (COA). The revisions enable better categorization of operating activities and a system cleanup of inactive values/codes has resulted in less redundancy and more consistency with the use of chartfields which simplifies the preparation of institutional reporting to the provincial government and other stakeholders. More details on these changes can be found here. 

A new Chart of Accounts (COA) Chartfield Request procedure under the Financial Management and Practices Policy came into effect to better govern and enforce the revisions. The new procedure describes the updated definitions and parameters for the chartfields and identifies FPP as the owner of the university’s chartfield structure.

The project team is now working on forms modernization and examining certain values used in the coding of transactions to move forward with the next steps of COA to further enhance the quality of reporting data. 

Service Governance 

The project team is engaging leaders in the USOF portfolio in developing a tool to help define value in the context of university-wide services and to ensure resources are focused on the highest priority areas. 

This work will inform any solutions developed to address service governance issues, clarify process ownership, and provide better definitions for roles and responsibilities within each portfolio. This will reduce bureaucracy and delays in delivering high quality, efficient and timely customer-centric services throughout the university.

Finally, as the service governance model takes shape and the work of the CASIP program progresses, engagement with the university community will continue. Your insights and perspectives are invaluable when making improvements that, ultimately, affect you and the way you work.  

As always, if you have questions or concerns about any of the CASIP projects, please reach out to us or contact the University Initiatives Office team at uio@ualberta.ca. 

Please distribute this to your teams as appropriate.

This communication has been shared with the following groups: Vice-Provosts, Vice-Presidents, College Deans, Faculty Deans, Chairs, CGMs, FGMs, ADMs, AVPs, CoS, USOF.