Standardized Administration Tools (SAT) Project

(Was: SchoolAdministrationTools investigation project)

Table of Contents

Project Objective: Purpose

The purpose is to investigate and implement a toolset for administration of CS data such as room/desk purposes and assignment; inventory of rooms by type; people and their positions; visitors and their sponsors; and many other elements. Investigation will include discussion with CS administrative staff, and discussion with other units to determine what tools they have. Implementation will include a CS database, front-ends that are useful to end-users, and automation of workflows where ever practical.

Project Scope/Deliverables

The high-level outcomes of this project are as follows:

• identification of Administrative tools and functionality for inclusion in database
• specification of a scope and timeline
  • what features are critical
  • whether to consider non-CS usage
• implementation of a postgres database
• implementation of one or more user front-ends

Scope Includes/Excludes

Includes

• Investigation includes discussion with identified end-users
• App will cover data for Grad Students, Faculty, Researchers, Visitors, Staff and Undergraduates
• Making available necessary documentation
• Importing- or access to- back-data from existing spreadsheets/tools; as much as to be useful

Excludes

See SchoolAdministrationToolsRequirementsGathering#Future_work

• workflow to handle change-requests [ for this version, we can simply email requests to the responsible person ]
• feed student data into the Grad Office database - either by filemaker 16 reading our postgres data, or our app hitting an API on the filemaker server to trigger updates
• People data adding/editing: accreditation, grants, awards won
• travel claim system
• non-administrative and administrative access by other permission levels controlled by groups - big area for improvement; could possibly use "Grouper" software.

Constraints

• These tools need to be at least as easy to use as what staff are currently doing

Assumptions and Risks

• Assumption that we can identify all of the staff workflow and data needs- without leaving out seldom-used but critical requirements that we later discover.
• Workflow and data needs are fairly stable and won't be invalidated by new rules and requirements shortly after deploying.
• Discussions with people outside CS will allow us to non-ambiguously decide that either one of:
  • processes are fairly standard across campus and so it's worth it to design it to be potentially useful outside of CS; or else
  • processes are quite independent across campus so it's not worth trying to design for wider usefulness at this time.
• A risk is that while scoping the project, we fall down a rabbit-hole of "this person does this, but that relies on having data from this other person, which relies on still another set of data, and what's the optimal way to get that data"

Project Members

drallen (project manager), lfolland, ijmorland

Project Stakeholders

CS Administrative Staff (including Grad Office), CSCF

Project Sponsor

Martin Karsten/Ken Salem/Craig Kaplan

RT

• /RT#672674

See also

• School Administration Tools History
• Powerpoint of talk at WatITis 2022: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~drallen/talks/SAT-watitis2022.pptx
• Video recording of talk at WatITis 2022 (18 minutes)

Implementation Plan

• 2018-01 - 2018-12
  • SchoolAdministrationTools investigation
• 2019-01 - 2019-04
  • 2019-03-29: Have requirements for SAT Accounts Management
  • 2019-04-18: Have roadmap for Spring 2019
• 2022-01 - 2022-04
  • 2022-02-01: Have testing instance fully deployed at https://sat.cs.uwaterloo.ca/
  • 2022-02-23: Requirements review of student and general accounts data for Infrastructure (Clayton)
  • 2022-03-01: Demo of automated student accounts data for Infrastructure (Clayton)
  • 2022-03-21: Demo of Room Managment
  • 2022-04-12: Demo of ExpertiseDatabase with Raouf, Craig, and Joe
  • 2022-04-25: Second demo of Room Management with Diana and Greg
• 2022-05 - 2022-08
  • 2022-05-27: Access to testing version for administrative users (Joe, Diana, Greg)
  • 2022-06 : As we have feedback from Clayton, update automatic updates and accounts data for Infrastructure
  • 2022-08-01: Greg's data is up-to-date in both his spreadsheet and SAT; Daniel works with him to set up new rooms

Meeting Notes

• See School Administration Tools Requirements Gathering (2018) and SAT Accounts Requirements (2019-2022)

-- DanielAllen - 2018-01-16