UDFS – Communication/Training Team Minutes

December 9, 2002

In attendance: Paul Anderson, Peggy Bottorff, Michelle Broadway, Julie Burton, Chris Cook, Al Fanjoy, Steve Grasson, Lisa Huber, Dave McCarren, Tim Miller, Dee Smith, Linda Somers, Janet Devry (substitute for Chris Murphy), Andrew Viehman (Crestone)

Minutes this time: Peggy Bottorff

Minutes next time: Al Fanjoy

GENERAL MEETING MINUTES:

Next Meeting: December 16

NO MEETING on December 23

Web Page:

Al Fanjoy has added the Powerpoint presentation from COA rollout to the Comm Team public info page.

Dee will add link from UDFS page to the Comm Team public info page.

Peggy will contact Mary Hempel’s office about publicizing our public site, by mention in UpDate, UDaily, or other means.

Software Access:

Some members have access to the FIDEV (the development instance); others don’t. Shortly, it will be beneficial to all to use FIDEV instead of FIDMO (the demonstration instance) because UD data will be put in FIDEV. Peggy will contact Van Adams and request logon IDs for everyone on team for FIDEV.

Labor Allocation and Encumbrance Update:

Peggy told team that plan is for people to be able to enter encumbrances for people’s pay, on ANY source of funds, with ANY end date – as an aspect of the Labor Allocation Module (LAM). This may not be done by July 1, 2003, but it is acknowledged by chair of exec committee (as well as Dr. Rich and Mr. Hollowell) that this should be/can be/shall be done.

Several on team said they’d like to give input into the LAM. Peggy will suggest at next UDFS planning meeting that a meeting be scheduled for LAM concept to be described to interested Comm Team members, and Comm Team members have chance for input.

Query Practice:

Linda Somers led team through creating a simple query. There were MAJOR problems with us being booted back to the query search page in the middle of designing a new query. It made using query manager nearly impossible. Peggy told group this was a known problem being worked on and that all acknowledge it is not acceptable, but no solution yet. (FOLLOWUP: at steering committee meeting later on 12/9, Peggy raised issue – Dr. Rich, Mr. Hollowell, Susan Foster, Roby etc. present. IT folks and consultants agreed this is a major issue which they are working to resolve).

Discussion ensued about how end users would find data they need, and how they will even know that some data elements exist. That is, there may be useful data in a module which is not publicized to end users, but which end users would find helpful. It was agreed that:

• Comm. Team members on module committees will seek to represent needs of end users as they learn about available fields.
• Comm. Team will be shown the fields that the report team thinks will be commonly needed for reporting, and will have a chance to give input/request additional fields.
• In the future, if end users desire access to a field not previously pulled into a view, the case can be made to make that data element readily available.