Staff recognition

Congratulations to all in ASR who have worked on the UM Reports Retirement project and brought us to completion on time! We have successfully replaced 10 highly used and critical reports, and retired 29 reports that were no longer meeting end user needs. A big thank you to SDA, ASR-IT, OTR, and OSI for your efforts in stakeholder analysis, development and testing of report replacements, providing ad hoc queries and fulfilling data requests, and communications support and coordination with OIT and the Enterprise Data Management and Reporting (EDMR) team. This has been a true collaborative effort to get us to the finish line.

Staff recognition

Congratulations to Sophia Bunker, Husna Ibrahim, and Patience Bergman for representing One Stop Student Services and the University of Minnesota at the Institute for Student Services Professionals (ISSP) annual conference. They co-presented to colleagues across the world with their presentation on Enhancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Competencies Among Student Services Professionals. It drew significant interest and provided attendees with high-quality information and practical resources to take back to their campuses. Thank you for your dedication and hard work to bring this to fruition!

Staff recognition

Shout out to Paul Enestvedt and Moses Ngombe! They’ve put in a great effort on the buildout of the Admissions subject area of the Enterprise Data Warehouse, which paved the way for the new UM Analytics dashboard for Undergraduate Admissions. This replaces the New Student Enrollment Dashboard: Freshmen (NHS) report and supports admissions staff tracking progress towards enrollment goals throughout the admissions cycle. We also want to thank the rest of the Student Data Analytics (SDA) team for covering additional work as this dashboard was prioritized.

Staff recognition

The University of Minnesota Twin Cities has signed onto and been accepted as part of the College Cost Transparency Initiative. As part of this, our financial aid notice was approved as meeting the standards of this initiative with no changes necessary! So major kudos to the Office of Student Finance, the UX and Content Strategy team, and One Stop Student Services for all of their hard work over the past years ensuring that our aid notices are compliant and transparent to students about aid types and costs. Thank you!

Staff recognition

We want to give a big shout out to everyone in ASR who stepped up during the UM Reports outage and ensured all of our stakeholders systemwide received their data, especially with it being unavailable at such a critical time of year. A lot of this work involved analyzing the data in the unavailable reports and then investigating ways to get it from other sources.

While many people have been involved in the effort, a special thanks goes to Tony Thomas, Andrew Hill, Carolee Cohen, Christopher Smith, Colleen Harms, Dan Delaney, Ian Whitney, Jack Kimmes, Marc Keaveny, Moses Ngombe, Paul Enestvedt, Rachel McKessock, Richard Toetschinger, and Sarah Hoegger.

Staff recognition

A huge kudos to our ASR staff who have been working on the Coursedog project for the last two years. The new Coursedog curriculum and catalog tools launched this Monday, August 21. Congratulations to the team on reaching this HUGE milestone!

The launch of Coursedog marks a transition for our University curriculum staff from ECAS & PCAS to a single Software as a Service (SaaS) system that integrates course and program approval workflows and increases process transparency. Coursedog also feeds both course & program data into a University Catalog website that is more user-friendly and accessible for all students.

It took a lot of people to make this project possible, and a sincere thank you goes to everyone who contributed to its success. Special thanks to the following ASR staff members who helped with the Coursedog Project: Allie Cummelin, Annalee Tomsicek, Christina Herold, Christopher Abts, Christopher Smith, Dan Delaney, Danielle Eberhard, David Norman, Frank Morello, Heather Micek, Ingrid Nuttall, Jennifer Peterson, Jennifer Selander, Jessica Clem, Kate Sophia, Kathryn J. Kvam, Matt Plachejo, Max Herman, Renae Faunce, and Sara Cokl.

Several project team members will continue supporting users and ongoing development of the Coursedog product post go-live. Special shout-out to Matt Plachejo who has taken on the role of Coursedog Product Owner. Matt will continue to work with the Curriculum Administration Best Practices governance group to implement University curriculum administration decisions into the tool and provide the University community with ongoing product feature updates.

Staff recognition

Congratulations to Cathy Schuster, Student Finance Counselor in the Office of Student Finance, for being named a 2023-2024 Gilman Advisor Ambassador! Focusing on scholarships for international educational opportunities, Cathy has helped countless students achieve their dreams of studying abroad during their careers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Way to go, Cathy, for joining this select group of individuals and representing our University in the study abroad community!

Staff recognition

Dan Delaney on the Quality Assurance (QA) team was part of the University Transit Pass campaign (Parking & Transportation Services) that recently won an award from the UMN Communicators Forum. Congratulations! Dan provided all of the student data for the campaign, and as one of the project contributors, he will receive an award certificate. The trophy will also be displayed in the Transportation and Safety building lobby.

We also wanted to recognize Sophia Bunker and Patience Bergman from the One Stop DEI Committee! They will be presenting at the Institute for Student Services Professionals (ISSP) conference in November. The presentation will focus on the ongoing “Booster Series” training the DEI team implemented over the last year for One Stop full-time staff. Congratulations Patience, Sophia, Susan, Husna, Cooper, Sarah, and Karen for a successful proposal!

Staff recognition

A big thank you to all the folks in ASR-IT for slogging through a few weeks of system issues affecting everyone’s daily work. We have had a few weeks of PeopleSoft and batch scheduling burps (not to mention separate vendor outages!) that have required time to troubleshoot impacts to applications, reporting, and data. Folks have been working closely with our OIT partners, talking to each other, and communicating impacts to users. Many, many thanks for your work fixing the things while you keep on top of daily operations.

AND, kudos to those of you who reported issues. Chiming in when things don’t seem to be working well and emailing help@umn.edu is critical in getting the right level of focus and attention to solving the problems.

Staff recognition

Kudos to Graduate Student Services & Progress (GSSP) Coordinator Molly Budke! May is GSSP's busiest time of the year, and this year Molly has been triaging and answering all of the escalated cases on her own. On top of that, Molly has also been training and supporting new staff in the student employee role and the second GSSP Coordinator role. In short, she is working extremely hard to keep the ship afloat. We aren't the only ones who are noticing Molly's dedication to her work, because two people submitted comment cards this week letting us know that she is doing outstanding work. Thank you, Molly!

We also want to give a round of applause to the One Stop, Student Account Assistance, and Third Party Billing Retreat Planning Committee (Ralph Daby, Darice Fowler, Jessica Ibarra, Melissa Gasper, and Sophia Bunker) for putting together a thoughtful, entertaining, and connection-driven retreat on May 23rd. This is the first retreat One Stop has had since 2019, and it was a wonderful experience for the staff to come together to discuss big picture ideas and develop deeper connections with one another. Thank you to the committee for a wonderful day!

Staff recognition

Shout out to the many members of the Coursedog Project team for their efforts to make User Acceptance Testing (UAT) successful! The team prepared the system, created materials, and supported nearly 100 ECAS and PCAS users over 8 sessions in two weeks. This testing helps to ensure users can complete their work in Coursedog when it launches on August 21. It also provides the opportunity to refine and improve training materials so they meet users’ needs. 

Special props to Matt Plachejo for facilitating all the sessions! Matt patiently and expertly fielded many questions from our future Coursdog users who were testing out Coursedog for the very first time.

Staff recognition

Congratulations to Carolee Cohen! She was the recipient of the President’s Award for Outstanding Service. The award is presented each year, and recognizes exceptional service to the University, its schools, colleges, departments, and service units by any active or retired faculty or staff member. Recipients go beyond their regular duties and serve as exemplars of the University community.

Staff recognition

We wanted to recognize everyone in ASR who quickly came together to help support a student and their family in the best way possible. Through thoughtful and swift collaboration, the individuals involved were not only able to ease some of the burden of the student and their family but also support colleagues across the University. Thank you to Mila Ly, Regina Moran, Stacey Tidball, Julie Selander, Nate Peterson, and Karen Magness for working so closely together and offering a great example of how strong collaboration across ASR makes a difference in students' lives.

We also wanted to give a BIG shout out of appreciation and thanks to the following staff who were instrumental in getting our estimated financial aid budgets and packages for 2024 new admits in order for Rochester and Twin Cities: Deb Edwards, Kari Ellering, Nate Rosckes, MEG Calabrese, Larry Bloom, Deb Wilkin, Meghan Czarniecki, Molly Nelson, Lugail Hamel, Lauren Peterson, Karen Magness, and the FA-IT team. This required multiple reviews, conversations, and manual interventions during the month of February. Most importantly, it required teamwork!

Staff recognition

We wanted to give a big shout-out to everyone in ASR who worked on getting the 1098-T forms out to students. It's a large, collaborative effort across units to coordinate all of the work that goes into supporting the forms.

We especially wanted to recognize Trung Mac for getting the paper forms out in the mail before the January 31 deadline and for processing all of the extra forms that could not be handled by Printing Services. In SF-IT, we wanted to give a round of applause to Lori Frase and Andy Fields for running the processes and coordinating all of the work to get the forms out. OTR and SAA also work on the forms by correcting data issues that can cause errors in form production.

In SAA, Lydia Self, Melissa Gasper, and Penny Levine all deserve a shout-out for handling bounce back emails and fielding requests and questions on the forms they receive through One Stop, as One Stop also plays a major role in supporting the 1098-T work. One Stop Counselors field questions from students and parents, explain information on the form, and screen requests for students who would like a 1098-T to be created for them. Way to go everyone! This work could not be done without you!

Staff recognition

In fall 2023, the ASR Application Development team started a new process for prioritizing work across all of the products they support. This involves working individually with product owners to identify work that needs to be done and then gathering all the product owners together to collaboratively order the work into one prioritized list. A retrospective of the first quarter using this process was held last week. The response of participants was generally very positive!

Product owners worked together to prioritize work with limited resources and built a backlog for the Application Development team. With the context of the work being requested, product owners discussed priorities with each other and occasionally even advocated for another product owner’s work request! In the end, 21 work requests were prioritized!

This is a great example of the strength of ASR’s collaborative approach! Members from the Application Development team, the UX and Content Strategy team, and product owners representing the work in all ASR units are involved in the success of this work.

Staff Recognition

Shoutout to One Stop Student Services! They received the following comment from one of our U of M parents whose student just graduated this past fall:

"I just have to say you all have been so wonderful these past four years. We have felt so lucky to have access to One Stop. You all must have the best training and hire the best people. Everyone is so kind, and I always get all my questions answered."