Vice Provost named as Acting Provost

President Kaler recently announced that Provost Karen Hanson will be taking a leave of absence from January through March 2019, rather than retiring. During her leave, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education Bob McMaster will serve as acting provost. Planning is underway for the interim leadership of Bob’s role in the Office of Undergraduate Education and an announcement will be made later this year.

New Error & Incident form available Nov. 12

A new Error & Incident (E&I) form/process will go live on Monday, November 12. ASR staff members use the E&I form to report and track system or service problems that may impact faculty, staff, and/or students. The process received a much-needed facelift over the course of the last few months and addresses many pain points of the old form. The new form:

• Allows for dynamic questions based on the status of an incident
• Connects ServiceNow ticket information
• Generates ServiceNow ticket at the same as submitting E&I report reducing duplicative work
• Allows easy communication between the E&I communication group members, including the person who submitted the report
• Each E&I report has a unique subject line to avoid Gmail truncating messages into a single conversation

These updates have made the process more user-friendly and flexible for varied situations. Look for further communications and links to the E&I communication group and all of ASR on November 12. Additional communications to our campus partners are planned as well. The new form will be linked on the ASR Intranet and the ASR Projects site, and we encourage you to update any of your internal team resources. If you have questions about the new form, contact pwf-team@umn.edu.

Next phase of training to prevent and respond to sexual misconduct

On November 1, the University began the next phase of the systemwide training to prevent and respond to sexual misconduct. This will ensure that faculty and staff hired since last spring are trained, and it establishes a process for training all new hires. The training will be rolled out as follows:

• Catch-up phase: Individuals hired after March 2018 will receive an email from training@umn.edu with a link to access the online training module. They will have two months to complete it.
• Ongoing phases: Beginning December 1 and every month thereafter, we will assign the training to all new hires. They will have one month to complete the training. (Depending on their role in the organization, new faculty and staff will receive either "Preventing and Responding to Sexual Misconduct for Employees" or "Preventing and Responding to Sexual Misconduct for Supervisors.")

Similar to the initial training rollout last spring, supervisors will be able to monitor training completions in the Tableau tool. As the training deadlines approach, email reminders will be sent to employees, and supervisors will receive reminders via email and MyU. For questions about the training, contact ASR’s HR lead, Mary Stein.

New GPAS exceptions system

The new, online GPAS exceptions system went live October 29, 2018. The new system began as a project within the PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.2 Upgrade to replace the old PDF exceptions form. The online exceptions system is highly configurable. Programs/colleges have the option to setup the system for their specific needs. For example, they can choose who submits requests (staff, faculty, or students) and who reviews them for approval.

The new system also provides automated communication notifications and quicker processing time. We appreciate all the time and effort that went into this project that better supports graduate and professional students’ timely degree progress and graduation. Feel free to reach out to Stacia Madsen at mads0066@umn.edu with questions.

ASR Outstanding Unit nomination

ASR was recently nominated for the 2018 Office of Equity and Diversity Outstanding Unit Award. In recent years, the staff of ASR has performed transformational work in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. ASR staff have demonstrated incredible leadership and willingness to embrace new concepts to promote positive change and raise awareness across the campus community. The nomination focused on the work of implementing functionality for gender identity and personal pronouns for all students, faculty, and staff; creating an ASR Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee that has worked to improve the recruiting and hiring of staff; implementation of two Campus Climate microgrants for diversity initiatives; and creating a more inclusive environment through accessibility initiatives and technology improvements.

Unfortunately, ASR did not officially win this year’s award, however, we commend the work of ASR staff for exemplifying the spirit of this award and for showing the University how ASR makes a positive difference in students’ lives.

One Stop Accepts EOAA Award

Last week, a team representing One Stop Student Services along with special guests Sue Van Voorhis and Robert McMaster, accepted the 2018 Lillian H Williams award from the University of Minnesota’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action (EOAA).

One Stop staff have displayed a deep dedication to fostering a welcoming and inclusive office in a variety of ways, including an update to the quality service standards and expectations; leveraging technology of the check-in kiosk to display the preferred name of the student; creating a summer book club for ASR staff to spark conversation around issues of identity, culture, and diversity; creating presentations and reflection activities to educate staff on topics including personal pronouns and microaggressions; and providing an opportunity for all student-serving staff to have new name tags and nameplates with personal pronouns.

One Stop Student Services accepts EOAA award, 2018

EOAA award plaque

SQL challenge

Have you attended Cindy's SQL Tutorial class and thought, "wouldn't it be great to have an opportunity to test my query writing skills?" Whether you have attended this class or not, the time is now. Each month (or so) a new challenge will be posted to Google Drive. The current challenge and some of the previous challenges have been added. You will have roughly two weeks to complete the challenge and then we will share Cindy's SQL and the actual results so you can verify if your query returned the same information. The answer to the last challenge will be posted to the answer folder after Thanksgiving. So go ahead, challenge yourself! If you have any questions, contact pwf-team@umn.edu.