Modified Administrative System Sample Assignment

Assessment 1

Specification of the new of modified administrative system

This assessment will focus on the creation of a new administrative system for leave approval purposes. This system needs to be implemented in a company that wants to manage leave requests in an efficient and effective way, in order to streamline the leave request process for employees and guarantee a fast response by senior management, with the oversight of the Human Resources function.

Requirements for the leave request administrative system

The purpose of the system is to allow employees to easily file and get approval for leave request through their computers, by using an electronic system that the company needs to develop together with its IT department and with the potential support of computer/software suppliers, IT trainers and administrative system consultants. Once implemented, the internal users of the system will mainly belong to three groups: employees filing the leave requests, senior managers accepting the leave requests and the Human Resource function storing the information for control and reporting purposes and adjusting employee compensation accordingly. Other internal stakeholders include the IT function, which will address any technical problems that may arise with the correct functioning of the system, and the Finance function, which will have to oversee and approve the costs associated with the creation of the system. The creation of the system needs a thorough planning process to define the specificities of the system that best suit these stakeholders’ needs. The minutes of a meeting involving an employee representative, a senior manager, an HR representative, a Finance representative and an IT technician are reported below.

Leave approval administration system meeting minutes

• HR representative: thanks for joining the meeting today, as you know we are here to discuss the creation of a new administrative system to process leave requests made by employees. This session is focused on gathering different suggestions for the creation of the system, as well as to raise considerations based on cost and technical requirements. From the users’ side: what are the employees’ recommendations for the new system?
• Employees’ representative: from a user perspective, it is important that the system has a clear and easy to use user interface, accessible from different platforms like computer and mobile, as many employees of the sales department are usually out of office with no access to their computer.
• Senior manager: from the approval side, it is necessary that the system is easy to use and that all the requests are easy to access for the managers in charge. At the same time, it would be important that the requests be notified through an e-mail to the senior managers of the employees filing them.
• Employees’ representative: relatedly, it would also be important for employees to get an e-mail that notifies them of their manager’s approval, as well as having the system notifying the manager of the request with a further e-mail in case he hasn’t answered to the first one for a given period of time, say, one week.
• HR representative: from an HR perspective, the system needs to provide a tool to transfer the information about all employees’ request into a spreadsheet, in order to allow for an easy control and reporting. At the same time, it would be optimal if the system could sync with our payroll management software to automatically adjust available days of leave and compensation for each employee.
• IT technician: notification system and easy interface can be developed internally, however to allow for system connection we would need the help of the software producer that has provided us the payroll management system.
• Finance representative: limiting the sourcing of this service from a single provider is likely to increase our costs, as we wouldn’t be able to compare different quotes. I suggest considering other software providers and evaluate different offers.
• HR representative: here’s to wrap up the considerations made in this meeting regarding the requirements of the new leave request administrative system:
  • Easy to use user interface
  • Possibility to access on different platforms
  • Notifications for employees and managers
  • Data convertible to a spreadsheet for reporting and control purposes
  • Connection with payroll management system
  • Contact software producer of payroll management software
  • Consideration of different providers to choose most competitive quote

Selection of suppliers

Out of the considerations emerged during the leave approval administration meeting minutes, two software providers have been contacted. The below matrix shows the quotes for each of them and other relevant information regarding the different requirements emerged during the meeting.

A further meeting after the consideration of the quotes from different suppliers has led to the choice of Sinktel. The company is the one that already provides the payroll management system, and thus is able to allow for compatibility between the two systems. This is considered a critical element for HR operational purposes, and since Sinktel ticks all other boxes relevant to users (easy to use interface, accessibility from different platforms and notification system), it also represents the supplier that meets the interests of employees and managers. The only service that Sinktel is not able to provide at a competitive price is convertibility of data to spreadsheet, but consultation with the supplier has shown that the data can be easily converted to spreadsheet once exported to the payroll management system. For these reasons, the company has selected Sinktel regardless of the higher costs, since the operational savings guaranteed by compatibility outweigh the cost difference, which meets the budget allocated by the Finance function for the implementation of the new system.

Implementation Plan

Once the supplier has been chosen, it is necessary to implement the new system through an implementation plan comprised of different steps.

Development of system and/or installation

The development of the system will be handled by Sinktel in collaboration with the internal IT function, which will oversee the implementation of the service deliverables agreed upon in the quotation phase.

Testing

The system will first be implemented on a small-scale to allow for testing and identifications of bugs and errors to be corrected. In this phase, a group of employees, managers and HR representatives will be involved in the process and asked to individuate any relevant errors in the system’s functioning, which will then be corrected by Sinktel and the IT team.

Communications to introduce new system and written procedures

Once the troubleshooting phase will be over and every error emerged will be corrected, an      e-mail will be sent to all employees communicating the new system as well as providing a presentation that highlights the new procedures and functioning of the system in detail.  It is important that this e-mail be sent by a top manager of a function in charge of the project, i.e. head of information system or head of human resources, to generate higher exposure and prominence of the communication. It would also be fruitful if, prior to the communication, the CEO could take some time during a general meeting to introduce the changes in the leave request system, explain its purpose to create a faster and more efficient process and encourage users to adopt it.  At the same time, it is important that commitment is also generated at a senior management level, as it would help influence all the workforce through a top-down approach.

• Example of written system procedures

Some of the system procedures contained in the presentation sent as well as the training administered to users can be find below.

1. To open the program, open it from the “start” button of your computer in the “all programs” tab or from the “administration” tab of the company’s website (accessible also from mobile)
2. Enter employee/manager credentials to access the system
3. Select type of request
   1. File leave request
   2. Visualize your team members’ leave requests
4. To file a leave request, select the days of leave from the calendar in the following screen, give a reason for leave, select the name of your manager and select “send request”. A notification will be sent to your manager’s e-mail address.
5. Team members’ leave requests can be accessed from the notification e-mail sent to the manager’s e-mail address or by selecting “Visualize your team members’ leave requests” if accessing the system as highlighted in point one. The screen displays a table with the pending requests with the possibility for managers to accept or decline requests.

Troubleshooting tip: if system crashes, log out from the system and relaunch the program. If the problem persists, contact IT support for assistance.

• Example of communication sent to the workforce

Dear colleagues,

as anticipated by our CEO during last month’s general meeting, the new leave approval system will be available starting from October 10. As already highlighted, the purpose of the new system is to streamline the leave approval process, making it faster and easier to file and approve a leave request. Attached you can find a presentation that highlights the key features of the new program and the system procedures. In the following weeks, a series of training will be held to explain the functionality of the system in detail. For any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Jerry Brown and his team, who are in charge of the project.

I hope that you will find the new system more efficient and easy to use than the current one.

Kind Regards,

Logan Harris, Chief IT Officer

Skills assessment and training

Once communication is sent, it will be necessary to hold some training session for employees and managers to learn using the system. These training sessions will be administered with the collaboration of Sinktel representatives, who are the best suited to answer technical questions regarding the new system. Given that the new system will be potentially used by the whole company workforce, in big companies it might be efficient to hold the training during a general meeting or administer it through an internal communication platform such as Windows Lync. It is important to give users the chance to ask questions and engage them to participate as much as possible, in order to increase commitment at all levels.

• Training needs analysis

The testing phase has highlighted a hierarchy of training needs that need to be considered. The biggest problems have emerged in the understanding of the software functioning, therefore maximising software knowledge through detailed presentations and examples is the most important aspect to consider for training purposes. At the same time, general computer skills are important, as users that performed poor on this aspect had more difficulties operating the system. Another important element is the degree to which users felt they were engaged in an open communication with clarity of explanation and good level of engagement. Finally, users that were involved in smaller session working as a team to perform a series of task with the software showed a higher performance in using the new system, highlighting the positive outcomes of a team-based approach.

• Skills audit

Based on the above considerations emerged from the training needs analysis, the below skill matrix identifies the skills of a selected pool of managers, among which two will be chosen to administer the training to other employees. The skills score are displayed on a scale from 1 to 10, while the skills have different weights according to their importance. On the last row, the score for each candidate is calculated multiplying the skill score times the weight and summing all the results.

Based on the skill assessment matrix, the managers chosen to administer the training are Jesse Locke and Liv Abbey, as they have the highest overall scores.

Risk management plan

Finally, the company should implement a risk management system to identify potential hazards connected to the new system, assess exposure to risk and probability of hazards to occur as well as implementing risk management measures accordingly. From a technical perspective, the company already has a relationship with its supplier, which also provides the payroll management software. As such, the supplier, which also complies with the ISO 9000 standard for quality management, is considered highly trustworthy. Relevant sources of risk, risk rating on a scale of 1 to 10 and risk management measures are presented in the below matrix.