Title: ITS Forum: EASY Re-engineering
Time: 5/29/2009 10:00AM – 11:00AM in 141 Computer Bldg
There was a misunderstanding on what the workshop is about on my side. I didn’t realize the word “EASY” is an acronym of a Human Resource internal work flow system. Instead, I thought EASY was capitalized to emphasize the ease of the re-engineering methodology.
Fortunately, the experiences presented in the workshop were still very relevant to system deployment in general.
The challenges the EASY team have include:
1. The want to port the original 3270 terminal interface to web interface. This is very understandable — I can immediately imagine the coding cost for terminal interface, as well as the operation training cost and the cost to maintain a terminal program on the client side. One of the major improvement they put in is now all the acronyms of the form can easily be explained (or even abandoned) by use of plain English — thanks to the powerful web interface.
2. They use JAVA to replace the old code. JAVA is one of my favorite languages for its clean design and resourceful libraries. It has also been one of the easiest languages for project maintainance, from my own experience.
3. They also decided to take the chance to consolidate the workflow. There are a few things:
3a. Originally, most forms need multiple levels of authorization. And the routing of authorization is defined by PSU IDs. For example, if a form needs authorization of an employee, her supervisor, the chair of the department, the chair of the school, and the president, the old system has all the IDs written. If there is any job duty change, or job change, one needs to search the whole system to replace the old IDs with the one of the new person. To make it worse, a person holding multiple positions/responsibilities, after job changes, may hold part of the original responsibilities. The solution is to assign ROLES and then assign PSU IDs to the ROLES. It seems to be a very obvious approach today but probably it was difficult with the old framework. Another improvement is the use of email notification. Well, that is self-explanatory.
3b. Multiple forms are merged (there are 70+ forms developed in the past 20 years and a lot of them serve similar functions). Each form is now a unit that can be freely combined into “processes” for different needs. This is object oriented design. Now there are 13 financial and 7 OHR processes. This is impressive improvement.
I’m always very interested in the cost of projects. I was told it’s a huge project involving 8 university units and there were about 70 people involved in the consultation. I wasn’t able to get the detail information on how the estimation of the cost was done but it seems to be quite obvious that the modernization of the system is unavoidable. It’s still an on-going project and only parts of their work flows are modernized. I assume there must have been some HR operation cost estimation involved to prioritize the work flows to be improved.
What also interests me is how they make the transition smooth for the users. Brad and I have always put in a lot of thoughts when pushing out a new feature in Blogs @ PSU. The EASY folks do something called “limited deployment”. They choose three institutes to test out the new interface before university-wide deployment. During the time, the beta testers have access to both new and old interfaces so they can always fall back to use the old system should the new one doesn’t work. And the development team can take feedback during this test.
From this fact, I guess that the development team probably keeps the backend data scheme so the interface has the access to the same data. This requires the abstract design which separates raw data and the data processing. And a logging system will be crucial for event retrieval.
Another thing that I am pleasantly impressed is the appearance of Beth Hayes. She is retired but volunteered to present some of the initiatives started during her days. It feels good to see people enjoy their job and their jobs are not only jobs but part of their life and passion.