Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Managing health checks in Agresso TM Tutorial

One of customers Banverket is working in an industry where regular health checks is one part of certification for employees. To be certified to work on i.e railroad tracks there is a set of business rules that defines how often and what type of health check you are required to do.


The health check requirement is just on of several other checkpoints they need like attending training on safety on rails and a numerous of things. What we want to do is to enable employees and managers to ensure the certification is met an book keep this in in the system.

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Age Frequency (months) Type of check
18-40 60 Full
18-40 18 Small
40-55 36 Full
55- 12 Full

Business rules for health check

To accomplish this we need to use competencies/certifications, activates and profiles and configure with these.

Competencies/Certifications

So given the above rules we need two types of health check certifications, one full and one small. So lets start by setting this up. Go the Alternative competence library and click Add alternative competence

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Fill in the form with with following data

Name: Regular health check

ID: healthregular



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Make the following settings on expiration and click OK, 60 months is the maximum length. We will later add a system jobb that will adjust these based on age (that job needs support from Agresso)

Add another one called Small health check but set the expiration to 18 instead of 60

Now if you do a search on alternative competencies for health it should look like this:



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Next we are going to add these to a Competence profile, in this case I am going to create a new profile with just these two but you could of course add them to any profile.


  • So go to Competence administration/competence profiles and click add.
  • I am going to call my profile “Health check Profile” and click ok
  • On the next page I will find my health elements regular and small and check them
  • Click ok

Now we are all set up to assign people the requirement for health checks, lets assign the profile to your self, I will go in under find employees and search for myself, click Competence profiles on my row. Right now as you can see I don't have any profiles

image


Click on add profile and assign me to the Health profile by clicking add, I will also check the current profile since I don't have any other. Click ok.

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As you can see above I have 0% fulfillment which is expected. Now you and/or your manager can go in and assign you this competence, this of course is only true if you choose self assessment. That's all right, but also under expired competencies you can now se that you are missing competencies.

image


So now we have a way to identify the need for health checks on employees that are under 40. Both the employee and mangers can now follow up on what we needs to be done.

Next blog will cover how to set up an activity so when you click the Close Gap button you will be presented with some health check options that will fulfill your gap. And the post after that will cover the job on how to to adjust the expire duration based on age.

Monday, August 31, 2009

Agresso HRM is continuing to invest in Quality software

We are still focusing on quality software here on HRM and apart form starting to make some backend changes to our build and check in process we have committed our selves to reach a bug count of 0 before we start up new development. We are of course aware that there may still be bugs but we really want our customer and our selves to get a new clean start with 4.5. On top of this commitment of fixing all open bugs we recruited a senior software tester that will join us at office on September 7. Not only will she be responsible for improving our test she will also help and manage the testing process from story cards to test cases. We are looking forward with great anticipation on the influence she will have on us here at development.

 

First priority for our new tester

  1. Improve our ability to avoid regression bugs
  2. Functionality testing
  3. Usability testing

 

The hunt for quality

So how is the journey towards 0 bugs going, are we ever going go build features again you might wonder. If I may say so its going pretty darn well. And one reason for knowing this is that we have consolidated all customer bugs in to one list and we only work from this list. Here is a couple of quality KPI for you.

 

bugcount

As you can se we have 23 open bugs at the moment. Don’t be alarmed by the deleted bug count. A bug can be deleted for a couple of reasons.

  • Its already fixed in a later version
  • Its a duplicate
  • Its not reproducible for us
  • Its NOT a bug, its  a feature ;) yeah I know but its true its now common but they do exist.

Also an interesting measurement is what kind of bugs are we finding and getting reports on .

We have 3 mainly three categories of bugs

Blocking – That is a bug so severe that there is no way around it, all or most customers would be affected by it because its a central piece of functionality.

Critical - That is a bug that is severe but there is a way around it, all or most customers would be affected by it because its a central piece of functionality.

High – All other bugs

The below chart illustrates both progress and the type of bugs: 
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As you can see our fixrate is almost twice as high as the found rate, So given that we have a sustainable pace on both fixing and finding bugs it looks like we will be done with all bugs in about three weeks time  (26 currently open, 18 new bugs per week and we fix around 40 a week).

Friday, August 28, 2009

Alternative competences, profiles and expiration

This is a short tutorial on how to set up the Talent Management Portal to use alternative competences with expiration dates in competence profiles to manage required renewal of employee knowledge.

To go through this tutorial you need to have a role that allows you to create alternative competences, competence profiles, activities and assign competence profiles to employees. To approve of the employees activity result you need to be his or her manager. Also the NextLearn.CompetencePortal.Model.Learning.ProcessCompletedActivities job must be running. If the job isn't running or you're not sure how to check this contact your system administrator.

This tutorial will not explain activity, customer or provider filtering, nor will it explain in detail the basic creation of competence elements, profiles or activities. It will solely go through the procedure to combine these items in the correct way to make competence expiration work.

Creating an alternative competence element
Select Alternative competences in the menu and fill out the form that opens. For this exercise the most important datum is the expiration date. Set an expiration date of 2 months.

Creating a competence profile
Select Competence Profiles in the menu and create a new competence profile that contains the alternative competence created above as a required element.

Assigning the competence profile
Assign the competence profile to an employee of your choice.

Creating an activity
Select activities from the menu and create a new Manual Authorized activity. After creating the activity click on the add objective link on the list row for the new activity. Choose Select objectives - competence standard, and add the newly created alternative competence element as an objective of the new activity (note that you may have to change category in the competence element selection form to Alternative competences).

Enroll employees
Enroll the employee to the activity created above. For Manual Autorized activities no occasions are necessary.

Approve the activity result
As manager go to the manager start page and follow the link X consultations to handle. This brings you to a page where you can set the status of the employee's activity. Set the status to approved, and click Ok. After a while the employee will have been awarded the competence element.


Expiration

All that is necessary for the competence element is for some time to pass. The default setting in the Talent Management Portal is to include competences that will expire within two months or competences that have already expired. Thus by selecting expired competences in the menu you should be able to see the employee you just assigned the competence to.


Thursday, August 27, 2009

An after holiday build and a word on current work

Today we are happy to release a holiday build for version 4.4 where we have spent the last couple of months fixing bugs and greatly improve quality overall 222 bugs fixed in 4.4 and 4.5 (more on 4.5 further down) in since the last build. And we are closing more than are found and as of today no blocking bugs are not unlooked at. 

if you are interested in that build you can get it from our support.

Among the most significant fixes you will find:

  • The possibility edit CV list values in 4.4
  • Fixing some IE8 rendering bugs. We have not tested ie8 full but we are not aware on any more show stoppers to use ie8 anymore.
  • Fixing the login issue after being logged due to inactivity
  • Appraisal now looks ok in 1024*768
  • for a full list of fixes login to the extranet and download the chart of fixes

I also wanted to share with you what we are focusing on during Q3 of 2009 and a little bit abut the roadmap. We are adding more power to our team by adding a software tester and focusing on quality builds even more. Also as we are implementing SCRUM we doing a restart of the implementation by assigning one of developers as responsible for quality, this role does not mean he will fix bug. But his focus during development will be to think about architecture and design from maintenance perspective and tools to help us to automate test.

Our hopes are by increasing quality we will be able to both decrease the number of builds and also increase number the features in each release.

Immediately after the summer it will be possible to have a new version 4.5 where we are introducing our SOA framework, first out is the possibility to both read and write organizational and user data thru webservices/wcf thus enabling you build applications on our high quality hr data and reduce cost of integration. More details about this will be posted here later. Another very exiting feature is the possibility as a system admin to edit the user and organizations layout pages, this will also be covered in a later blog post.

Another cool thing we are enabling are an update to our the SCORM engine and the integration layer it will now be possible to log interactions and order custom reports to analyze your online training.

Andreas will post a blog about this shortly.



The releasenotes can beaccess thru the agresso extranet.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Release notes 4.4.3821

Today we released 4.4.4.4.3821 with bug fixes for 4.4 .

If you would like to have a patch for you version, send a note to support.hrm@agresso.se stating your current version.

The version number can be found on the System Administrators start page.

The release notes are both available in our Agresso AB extranet if you don't have an account yet I would recommend you to sign up for one there will be much more information there in the future.

 

/Christian

Monday, May 25, 2009

Catalog Search is fast again

Hello

My name is Tomas Särnhammar and I am a developer at Agresso HRM.

We are now rolling out release 4.4 to the first customers and last week it was time to upgrade the Market Place (http://provider.nextlearn.net/) used by many Swedish Customers like Telia and Saab to search for and enrol on courses by commercial providers such as AddSkills, AchieveGlobal, Lexicon etc.

The really big news i 4.4 is that the organization hierarchy can be arbitrarily deep. This is used in contracts and filtering so that contracts and filters on a higher level and valid on lower levels unless an organization on a lower level has its own contract or filter. This makes contracts an filtering both simpler to use and more powerful. We recognized early on in the development that this may be a performance problem if we where not careful. The reason is the that the rules for which filter and contract that is valid for a given seller and customer organization can be complicated:

  1. The amended filter rules can be complicated, by filtering on category and activity type etc.
  2. Both filters and contracts are typically done on a high level in the organization hierarchy and this means that for most organizations we must search up in the hierarchy to find the first organization with a contract and filter.

For filters we saw during development that evaluating the rules "in run time" was too slow, and we solved that by creating the system job "B2bAccessUpdateJob" that evaluates all filters (all recent changes to filters actually) and stores the result in a way that is fast to use in the catalog search, an indexed table in the database. This job must be scheduled to run periodically in order to keep the filters updated.

Initially we thought that the organization hierarchy search for contracts was fast enough as we store the hierarchy itself in a search-friendly way (again a separate indexed table). That was not the case.

When we upgraded the Market Place the database server almost stopped. The Market Place is an Agresso HRM talent management portal configured to accept catalog searches via a web-service interface from other portals. This means that the catalog search load is much higher than on a typical (or even large) installation.

It turned out that the contract search was the culprit. It was implemented in a view in the database, and it was too expensive to select from in the search. Last week we changed that using the same technique we used for the filters. We created a table that is the "expansion" of the view, meaning that the table has the same columns as the view, and it should contain the same rows. On the the table we created indexes that are relevant for the search. The same system job that keeps the filter tables updated, was amended to update the new contract table too. Every time the system jobs runs, the rows in the table are updated to match those of the view.

This update returned the load on the database server from 100% to a healthier 15%. The catalog search time for individual searches went from sometimes 30 seconds to near-instant in all cases.

regards

Tomas Särnhammar

Monday, May 18, 2009

Release notes 4.4.3815

Today we released 4.4.3815 with bug fixes for 4.4 the most noticeable improvement is the speed of activity search but there is a lot of other fixes as well.

If you would like to have a patch for you version, send a note to support.hrm@agresso.se stating your current version.

The version number can be found on the System Administrators start page.

The release notes are both available in our Agresso AB extranet if you don't have an account yet I would recommend you to sign up for one there will be much more information there in the future.

 

/Christian