Planning II

There is the strong possibility that my department at work will be consolidated with another department at work over the next few days. That is to say, the consolidation will be announced in the next few days. For the consolidation to be complete will take at least two months.

My boss will take on the responsibility for the programming side of things effective immediately. The goal is for her to take on the operations side of the department by April 1. In order to do that effectively, we need to plan it out. That's where I come in.

By Monday, I need to figure out what the transition is going to look like, what we expect the end goal of the department to be and how we are going to get there.

Essentially, the department we are merging with has been operating as a separate organization within our organization. This has created a lot of inefficiencies. These inefficiencies are potentially making things more difficult for the people who work within the organization and are almost certainly costing us money.

So what would an efficient process look like? What is the ideal that we want to achieve?

The program gets by paid based on the number of certified hours that eligible, enrolled students attend. From the program side of things, our goal is to get as many students to attend as possible. From the operations side, we want to ensure that every hour that a student attends is an hour that we can be paid for.

In order for a student to count, the student must be:
A) Eligible
B) Enrolled
C) With our organization
D) With a start date prior to the date attendance is taken.

The student must:
E) Have a valid ID number
F) Sign in and out of a class
G) With a start time and end time
H) The class must be taught by a registered teacher
I) Whose ID number must be identified

The student must also have:
J) A student plan completed
K) Quarterly reports completed after 17.5 hours of program
L) Fewer than 75 hours previously completed.

Some of those pieces of information are registered in the system with each student enrollment. Some of them are reported to the city's Department of Education through a monthly upload. Others must be entered manually by our staff into the city's database.

In order for us to create the upload files, we must take the sign-in sheets required by the city and enter it into some database that will create the upload files for us based on the information we enter. As of two months ago, information was entered into a complex book of Excel files. So far as I know that has changed. I expect it to change again. The information for my department in the organization is all entered into a web-based database from which we purchase an annual site license. Ideally, that database would be able to create the reports needed for the upload.

Prior to the upload being submit, it must be "certified," where we sign off on the accuracy of the information we are submitting. If the information is missing any of the elements above, it will be rejected. Therefore it is imperative that we confirm the accuracy of all the information prior to certifying it, so that it is approved. To be honest, I'm not sure how we do that. I assume the current department has methods that are effective, but I won't know for certain until I go through the whole process once or twice.

Since the web-based database is not available yet, then we cannot count on it, and we will continue to use the current database, while still working to create the new database. In the meantime, we will need to enter information at the office. This will require that the attendance sheets be brought to the office. Currently, directors of our programs are required to come into the central office each Monday. I would ask them to bring in their attendance sheets at this time (this may already be part of the plan). For the programs who do not come in to the office, I would still want the hard-copy attendance on a weekly basis.

One person should be designated as the recipient of the attendance. This attendance coordinator will collect all the attendance sheets each week. He or she will confirm that all sheets from all activities are turned in on a weekly basis, that every sheet is correctly filled out, and if there are any missing or incorrect sheets, he or she will make sure that the errors and omissions are corrected.

There are 45 programs that run this particular kind of program. 15 also run programs under my boss' current purview. Rather than having two staff people entering information for the same school in two different places, one person will be assigned to enter all the information for five programs each. Three people will have that responsibility. For the other 30 programs, there will be four staff entering seven or eight programs each. I expect I will need three additional staff entering attendance for my current department as they currently do. That will be 10 people to enter attendance overall.

The department that we will be merging with has many high quality employees already. I don't want to lose the knowledge they have gained and don't want to lose their skill. I recommend one-on-one meetings with each of them, first so I can hear how the current process is structured, so I can see what obstacles they face, and so I can better determine what system will be most efficient. These meetings should take place in the first week of February.

I envision three other areas of need. In addition to entering the information, we need to upload the information on a monthly basis, we need to certify the information as explained above, and we need to produce management reports to report to the senior management and also to those in charge of the programs.

The management reports must be accurate, timely, and useful. They must provide information that will increase the quality of the program, but also must identify students who we are potentially missing hours for, whether because they are not coming, or because they are not officially enrolled. The production of and follow-up on these reports can be the domain of either one person, or can be an additional responsibility of the attendance coordinator. I am leaning toward the latter, since the attendance coordinator will already be speaking with the sites on an ongoing basis in an attempt to collect and correct all the attendance.

The certification and upload might both fall under the responsibility of another person. It appears that the upload is not just as simple as downloading a file and then attaching it to the DOE database. So one person might be responsible for running the upload, and another might be responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the data. Again, the accuracy of the data might be ensured by the attendance coordinator.

That's the plan.