Professional development opportunity leads to much more
Developing staff, collaborating and engaging with the campus community, and being committed to utilizing shared knowledge, creativity, and innovation to examine unique circumstances are some of the pillars that hold up the spirit of continuous improvement the Office of the Registrar tries to maintain. Recently there was one such experience that started with an RO developer and snowballed into something more, touching on all of these pillars listed above.
One of the projects the Office of the Registrar is taking on this year is reviewing and making changes to the academic standing process, which assigns an action to a student based on various criteria. This custom process, which is 20 years old, was written in a convoluted code that had been modified dozens of times and was difficult to maintain. This project became a positive snowball and rolled into much more than just the original project implementation.
Rather than just making patches and changing the code, the team decided to rewrite the process using app classes in PeopleCode, an object-oriented programming language. This started the first part of the snowball, rewriting the code to prepare for a review. Jim Vogel took the time to transition the code to this new format. He quickly realized an opportunity this code transition provided for cross-campus training since this type of programming language is not regularly used.
This started the second part of the snowball where campus partners Office of the Registrar, other DEM offices, and DoIT developers, 12 people in total, got together to attend a new training. In the spirit of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing, the training reviewed the new code that Jim wrote. The training took place with Jim Marion of JSMPROS and lasted 8 hours. The first half of the training was an overview of object-oriented programming in PeopleSoft, the second half was a review of the code and going over improvements that were specific to the project and this pre-written code. This type of training, utilizing already written code as a way to learn and improve is not common in the developer field.
What started as one initial project about improving the academic standing process, turned into an opportunity for team member engagement in not only a new type o f programming but also a new type of training, both of which extended beyond the RO and beyond DEM. This self-guided continuous improvement was made possible because of the transparency and vulnerability of team members being willing to share their work and utilized personal data/code to develop a more specific training that team members found more beneficial.