Merit compensation

Last week the Board of Regents finalized the budget and approved a 2.25% compensation pool for civil service and P&A staff. If you are civil service or P&A, were hired before January 1, did not have a reclass after January 1, and received a 2 or 3 on your performance appraisal, you received a 2.25% increase. (Bargaining unit increases are determined by contracts.) Merit increases were effective as of June 10, appearing on the July 3 pay date according to the pay period schedule. You can review your compensation history in MyU, navigate to My Pay, and click on “Compensation History” near the bottom.

ChromeRiver and expense reimbursements: an update or two

University administrative policy has changed so that the travel card reconciliation period and expense reimbursement period are aligned; these transactions must be processed within 60 days from the return date of travel. This additional time to reconcile will balance the delays for transactions to appear in ChromeRiver.

The best practice for processing Travel Card transactions is to send receipts into Chrome River as soon as possible. Sending receipts to Chrome River first allows the system to read the receipt (with optical character recognition (OCR)) and merge the receipt with the transactions when they load from the bank, which can take several days. Once the transaction has loaded, it will appear in the ‘credit card’ tab of your eWallet; be sure to wait until this happens before creating your report (to check: click on the 3 bars on the top left of the ChromeRiver home page > eWallet > Credit Card).

ASR Suggestion Box - Professional development over lunch

Opportunities for development such as the Book Club or Tech Tuesday are scheduled from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. not to take over lunch, but because that time is typically widely open on calendars. These events encourage a “lunch and learn” type of atmosphere. However, if you find yourself wanting to participate while still needing a traditional lunch break, work with your supervisor to identify an alternative break time to accommodate both activities.

Kudos!

Custom Solutions team

Early this week, the Custom Solutions team released a new version of the NCAA Certification Tool for Student Athletes and successfully updated Student Degree Progress. This work has been in progress for well over a year. Both were released as soon the TADA project launched the new APAS and both are working great. Congrats to all involved on all your hard work! Special thanks to Mike Brown and Remy Abdullahi for working to make sure the releases went smoothly.

TADA project team

On Monday the TADA project team released the new uAchieve APAS report to students and advisors. This software supports both Transfer Articulation and Degree Audits for all campuses and had not been updated for over a decade! Many thanks to all the TADA team members for their hard work and dedication to our students. The team tracked tons of details, presided over many user experience improvements, and worked with College Source (our vendor) to really modernize our infrastructure around these two important functions. The team managed to do all that good work and have a lot of fun too! Thank you to all in ASR who partnered with us. Phase 1 is complete. Onward to the second year of the project.

Scheduling team

Over the past weekend, Astra Schedule, the University’s academic and event scheduling system, was converted into four unique, campus-specific databases (Crookston, Duluth, Morris, Twin Cities/Rochester). It is the first, and largest, step in stabilizing the databases and improving both system performance and user experience. The expedited project was made possible due to a strong partnership with the vendor and the strength of the Ad Astra technical team here on the Twin Cities campus - Bob Quinney and Liz Johnson. Bob, Liz, and all of the Scheduling team have moved mountains to make this happen. Many thanks to the Scheduling team!

New APAS launches July 1

The first phase of the Transfer Articulation and Degree Audit (TADA) project will be complete when the new version of APAS launches on July 1. APAS (Academic Progress Audit System) is a tool used by undergraduates and their advisors on all five campuses to track degree requirements and progress. The University has used some version of this software for 30 years. The implementation of the most current version during this project is the first major update of the system since 2006.

The changes students and advisors will experience are contained mostly to the look and feel of APAS reports. Those who participated in usability evaluations said it is clean and easy to use.

Advisors who have access to process exceptions to APAS requirements are also excited to have an easier way to make those exceptions. This is the only group required to complete training to maintain their access in the new system and ⅔ of them completed the training in the first two weeks it was available.

The second phase of TADA starts immediately after the conclusion of the first and goes through July 2020. Work during this phase is largely focused on implementing the best practices for audit display developed during the first phase and getting transfer coursework details into PeopleSoft to enable prerequisite and repeat checking during registration.

Raffle and ASR picnic - July 25

This summer ASR is hosting a staff picnic with a raffle to raise money for the Student Success Fund. The items for the raffle are donated by our staff members—all of you! At the raffle, you will have the opportunity to purchase tickets (cash only) and submit tickets to win items.

ASR picnic and raffle

• Date: Thursday, July 25
• Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
• Location: Bruininks Plaza (outside)
• Catering: TBD (please RVSP to the calendar invite so we can plan for catering)

You may donate items for the raffle any time between now and the day before the picnic. Print a donation form to go with your items. (You can make a copy to fill it out online first.) Depending on which building you’re in, you can drop your donations and the form with:

• Megan Wollner in Fraser Hall 253
• Julie Selander in Bruininks Hall 225
• Eleanor Pijut in Williamson Hall 160M

In the past we have auctioned items like wall art, backyard games, gift baskets, IOUs for baked goods, handmade items like knitted mittens, board games, etc. All money collected goes towards the Student Success Fund, directly helping students to graduate.

Jadu forms in the making

The University’s new workflow tool, Jadu, will be available to use enterprise-wide later this summer. ASR is currently transitioning three forms (that were originally created with Transforms) to the Jadu tool. These include Change Estimated Graduation Term, Cost of Attendance Appeal, and Tuition Refund Appeal. We anticipate we’ll have these ready to use in July. Moving forward, we will be creating Jadu forms for the verification process for independent and dependent students, as well as the form used to activate non-degree students.

As a tool, Jadu allows us to create forms that are accessible, easy to use, and mobile-friendly. We are working on creating a workflow style guide to help make prototyping and development easier and to provide consistent user experience in terms of the workflows' content, layout, and related email notifications.