Graduate Aid Redesign Project
Payroll Meeting (03/09/2000)

March 9, 2000

Graduate Aid Redesign Project (GARP): Meeting with Payroll

Attendees:

1. Fred Crowley, Payroll Office
2. Maria Fernandez, Project Manager GARP
3. Dan Fitzgerald, Project Manager HR/Payroll Project
4. Norm Wright, SSIT

Agenda:

The goal of this meeting was to discuss the goals of the Graduate Aid Redesign Project and talk about the problems Graduate Administrators encounter as a result of the interface between MITSIS and Payroll.

In general terms, the Graduate Aid Project is aiming to resolve two major problems:

1. End User Interface (which will help speed up the data entry process).
2. Improve interfaces with other systems (including Payroll, SAP, Student Accounts, Who’s Teaching What).

In our meetings with Project Team members it became clear that the reconciliation process between Payroll and MITSIS is very complicated due to the following reasons:

1. Biographical Data in Payroll and MITSIS are not identical.

Even though Payroll has been entering Graduate Awards for a while and the biographical data has gotten better, this is still a problem. John Smith in MITSIS may not be the same John Smith in Payroll. This may be particularly difficult with foreign names.

2. Multiple appointments are not handled the same way in Payroll and MITSIS

What we may consider two appointments in MITSIS may be viewed as one appointment in Payroll. For example: In MITSIS, we may process two TA’s (for the same student) with the same accounts and level of support. We may do it this way to be able to capture subject information. On the payroll side, however, this may be interpreted as an increase in the previous appointment. If MITSIS shows 2 appointments and Payroll shows only 1, it really makes the matching process between the 2 systems quite difficult.

3. SANDI adjustments are problematic

Retroactive adjustments to account numbers are currently done via the SANDI. Even though this information is sent back to MITSIS, the original award record CAN NOT get updated because of (1) and (2) above. This is particularly hard to manage because more than one person is usually involved in this process: the Graduate Administrator that enters the data on MITSIS and the employee in charge of making SANDI adjustments. Unfortunately, when these changes are made on the SANDI, the Graduate Administrator may not be aware of the change. Besides reporting discrepancies, real problems occur when the user has to make a change to the appointment that has been "adjusted". What they call up on MITSIS and are making changes to is not an accurate reflection of the appointment because it does not contain the SANDI Adjustments. Thus they are making changes to and re-sending data to payroll and everyone else involved that is "obsolete."

After discussing the problems stated above, we decided the following…

Next Steps:

• Immediately begin Loading MITSIS biographical data directly into the Payroll System. Fred will talk to Mary Donovan and let us know if / when she can begin this project given her other project priorities.

• Jointly redesign the MITSIS / Payroll interface so it can unambiguously communicate the desired structure of the appointment to aid in reconciliation.

• Continue meetings such as this one to discuss approaches to keeping the two systems in sync when the users need to make retroactive distribution changes, "SANDI changes."

Date last modified: 03/09/2000 by the GARP Team