ASR Collegiate Connection tour

On behalf of Academic Support Resources (ASR), Sue VanVoorhis, associate provost and University registrar, recently completed visits with the leadership of every Twin Cities college and visits with Morris, Duluth, and Crookston campus leadership (23 meetings with approximately 120 people). Sue used ASR's five strategic initiatives as a framework to talk about ASR's work, and the operational and policy issues that impact the colleges. The sessions were helpful in making connections with important stakeholder groups, providing a forum for hearing each college's needs, and answering questions about issues important to them.

Sue was supported on selected topics by Stacey Tidball, Jeff Idle, Jeremy Todd, Tina Falkner and Adrienne Bricker.

Thanks Sue for this huge effort on behalf of ASR!

Upcoming IDP review and performance appraisal timeline

Stay tuned as the final form and instructions are distributed in the near future, so staff will soon be able to begin their self-assessments. With that in mind, here is an overview timeline for performance appraisals and IDP review (specific dates will be available soon):

• February: Employees should review IDPs with supervisors
• April 3: Employees submit self-assessments to their supervisor
• Mid-April: Supervisors submit to unit director
• End of April: Unit directors complete review and edits for all appraisals in their unit 
• First week of May: Directors complete review for consistency across ASR
• May: Supervisors and employees meet to discuss

Reminder: On Thursday, February 23, join in on a special ASR-wide in-service where Grant Clavelle will speak more in-depth about the self-evaluation process, followed by a refresher on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the federal law that protects the privacy of student education records presented by Stacey Tidball and Tina Falkner.

Developmental conversations

The supervisor/employee relationship is one of the keys to employee satisfaction and employees who work with their supervisors on goal-setting are 17 times more likely to be engaged, according to Gallup. To build on the good work already happening with IDPs, ASR is forming a project team to provide tools and supportive skill-based learning opportunities for supervisors, focused on developmental conversations. 

We are seeking both supervisors and individual contributors who are able to commit 2-3 hours per week to this effort. Your help is needed if you have experience with and passion for developing people and searching for best practices and developmental models. If interested, please email Adrienne Bricker with a few details about what is drawing you to this project team before Monday, February 20. 

ASR staff attend implicit bias training

Several members of ASR attended a training on “Identifying and Challenging Implicit Bias in Staff Searches.” The Office of Human Resources staff who presented the workshop shared best practices for recruiting and hiring. This information will be helpful for the ASR Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee as they work to enhance ASR’s recruiting, search and hiring practices. Some of the key takeaways included the importance of increasing candidate pools by promoting new jobs outside of the typical ways the University recruits and making sure to avoid taking shortcuts in the hiring process to move things along, which can result in implicit bias. 

Celebrating Black History Month

Since 1976, every US president has officially designated the month of February as Black History Month. It serves as an annual celebration of achievements by black Americans and recognizes the central role of African Americans in US history. There are a number of events for celebration on campus. See more details. 

OCM annual report

The Office of Classroom Management (OCM) and the communications team collaborated to create an annual report, which is now available. The annual report highlights OCM accomplishments and identifies trends that will impact OCM in the next year.

PCMC spring book club

Join the Project & Change Management Collaborators for their spring book club. We will be reading The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp (ISBN-10: 0743235274 paperback edition). Give your creative mind and skills a tune-up and learn how to apply creativity while managing projects. Join us for a lunchtime group discussion on Wednesday, April 19, 12:00-1:30 p.m. Read the PCMC Notice and check out the PCMC Book Club Page for more info.

DUO stats update for ASR

Thus far, 167 ASR employees (71%) have a device enrolled in DUO two-step authentication and have opted to use the service to access their W-2. However, there are 42 employees who have a device enrolled but haven’t opted-in for the W-2 service, and an additional 26 that don’t have a device enrolled at all. The University encourages all employees to use this service to help protect their personal information. You can find out how to enroll here.

Strategic direction: Course, Class, Calendar, & Classroom (C4) update

One goal of the PeopleSoft upgrade in 2015 was to retire custom applications and minimize modifications. As a result, the University retired its custom class search tool, and we now use the delivered PeopleSoft class search. The former, custom application for class search had wide acceptance at the University and the delivered PeopleSoft search is not as efficient, user-friendly or acceptable to the community. After discussing the negative response to the class search after the Upgrade, ASR collaborated with OIT to create a supplemental class search as a temporary solution for advisors and department staff. We also made a decision to allow time for users to adjust to the new, PeopleSoft class search and not pursue modifications.

We are now approaching the two year anniversary of the Upgrade and PeopleSoft has not delivered improvements to class search. As a result, ASR met with stakeholders this past Fall to discuss options. Representatives from OIT, Portal, CLA and ASR - including C4 members - were in attendance. Three different options were considered as solutions to provide a class search tool that would better meet community needs:

1. Modify the delivered PeopleSoft class search.
2. Expand using the temporary, supplemental class search tool to make it more robust and permanent solution.
3. Explore using the class search functionality within Schedule Builder and make it our enterprise solution.

The group decided to pursue Option #3, which was the best solution and follows our goal of minimizing PeopleSoft modifications.

C4 team members, ASR-IT and One Stop staff completed eight usability sessions on January 30 and 31 for Twin Cities users only. The team has a tentative go-live of mid-March, with a back-up go-live for early June.

We All Belong Here

The University launched a "We all belong here" campaign to support a welcoming, respectful campus climate for all. ASR's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee is ordering “We All Belong Here” posters for break rooms and meetings spaces in buildings where ASR has staff.

If you experience or observe a bias/hate incident, report it to the Bias Response and Referral Network.

Visit z.umn.edu/endbias for more images.

Steps for responding to an admission decision inquiry

1. Respond: Please let the inquirer know that you will forward their question to the Office of Admissions. Feel free to use the following language in your response:

“Thank you for your inquiry. The Office of Admissions makes admission decisions on the University’s behalf, so I will forward your inquiry to them right away for a response. Your inquiry is important to us and an admissions officer will contact you directly to answer your questions.” 


2. Send information to Admissions: Forward the contact, student information, and any questions to Sara MacKenzie, associate director of admissions, at (612) 625-3461 or saram@umn.edu. Sara will ensure a timely response to the student and their family.

Change to April graduation application date

Due to a planned PeopleSoft outage, the April 1 deadline for graduate and professional students to apply for graduation has changed to Monday, April 3, 2017. Note that the change is applicable only for the month of April; the following deadlines will continue to be on the first of the month. The change has been reflected in Dates and deadlines on the One Stop website.

OSF Brown Bag session

What: OSF Brown Bag session on "Using Equation Engine"

When: February 9, 2017, at 12:00 p.m.

Where: Fraser B20

The session is intended for Business Analysts and other IT staff in ASR, though anyone interested is welcome to attend. The session will be hosted by: Travis Stratton, Linda Miza and Sarah Hoegger.

Equation Engine is a tool provided in Campus Solutions that allows us to perform actions (Update, Insert or Delete) based on query results. There are three main uses:

1. Use with Pop Select enabled data.

2. Run directly from the program; such as packaging or tuition calculation.

3. Run to call a SQL and invoke an action. We use this quite a bit to update/change values in Campus Solutions for students.