Casual Academic Hire and Payment
The Casual Academic Hire and Payment (CAHP) project will improve the hiring and payment of casual academic staff across UQ.
As part of the consultation undertaken in relation to changes to HR and Finance, it became clear that the casual staff hiring and payment process was impacted by the centralisation of these two functional areas. It was also clear that the paper-based process was administratively demanding, and undertaken in a manner that was highly variable across organisational units.
The CAHP project is delivering an enterprise system which will standardise business process for the hiring and payment of all casual academic staff members across UQ.
Objectives
Later stages of the project aim to deliver the following functions:
- the ability to enter deviations from the assigned schedule into CAHP instead of Aurion
- a budgeting tool
- expression of interest, recruitment and selection/allocation functionality.
Progress
The initial stage of the project delivered a 'payment by schedule' functionality, which enables schools to specify the number of hours and correct payment rate for casual academic staff members for the entire semester in advance. Aurion then automatically pays these staff members according to the schedule.
As well as payment by schedule, the project has:
- delivered a Teaching Activity Schedule to display assigned teaching activities to Casual Academics
- facilitated the administration and collection of personal details from new hires
- fully automated the transfer of data between CAHP and Aurion for pay schedules and placement information.
Benefits to UQ
The project will provide:
- a consistent approach to the scheduling and payment of casual academic staff across UQ
- the creation of a standard work pattern based on allocation, which will enable payment by schedule
- a reduced need for time sheets
- a more simple time sheet system, on occasions that time sheets are still required
- budgets and variation statements for casual academic staff costs.
Timeline
The CAHP project commenced in 2017. It is being delivered in multiple releases, with Release 1.1 piloted in December 2017. More information on each release is available below, with the most recent release listed first.
Release 1.6 - Automatic Transfer of Placements
This release delivers functionality to automatically transfer placements to Aurion, removing the need for CAHP project team intervention.
Release goal and expected benefits
The fully automated integration removes the scope for human error and removes technical and administrative effort required to create placements in Aurion. A number of other features were also delivered:
- Head of School placements approval page
- New Hires progress page to track the progress of New Hires in the CAHP system
- Smoother spread of payments across the Semester (now rounded to 1 minute)
- Semester-specific pay schedule approval allows for unpublished preparation work in future Semesters while approving current pay periods.
Release 1.5 - New Hires - July 2018
This release delivers functionality to enter New Hires into the CAHP system.
Release goal and expected benefits
This release will supercede new hire spreadsheets. This removes delays incurred through manual handling of New Hires information and removes the potential for human error.
Functional Limitations
This release does not yet include a mechanism for the Head of School to approve placements for returning Casual Academics.
Release 1.4 - Automated transfer of pay schedule to Aurion - May 2018
This release delivers fully automated integration between CAHP and Aurion for pay schedules, removing the need for CAHP project team intervention.
Release goal and expected benefits
The fully automated integration removes the potential for human error and reduces the technical effort required to send pay schedules to Aurion. A number of other features were also delivered:
- Ability to create payments spread across Semester (as opposed to in specific weeks)
- Ability to review the full set of teaching activities
- Ability to map courses to position numbers to enhance workflow capability
- Locking and unlocking of pay weeks
- Teaching Activity Schedule provides easily accessible CAHP information to Casual Academics directly, as well as their supervisors and School administration
Functional Limitations
- The Teaching Activity Schedule is a read-only format. Additional functionality may be added later to enhance this new feature.
- Payments spread across semester divide the total duration into 15 minute increments and then (if applicable) multiplies by the number of students. This means that a low duration results in a somewhat uneven spread across Semester.
Release 1.3 - Placements integration and pay schedule approval - Feb 2018
This release delivers integration between CAHP and Aurion for the creation of placements (manually via CSV files) and allows for School Managers and their delegates to approve pay schedules for submission to Aurion.
Release goal and expected benefits
Placements and pay schedules can be created in Aurion, resulting in payment to Casual Academics according to schedule.
Functional Limitations
The placement and pay schedule information is not yet fully automated and requires some manual steps to be completed by the CAHP project team.
Release 1.2 - Initial release for Semester 1 - December 2017
This release provides an interface to support data collection for the creation of the payment schedule for all schools within UQ.
Release goal and expected benefits
The interface includes configuration options to allow schools to configure the types of teaching activities that are relevant to their units and their associated pay rates. The course planning interface is linked to SI-net and Syllabus+ to provide course planners with access to the most up-to-date information available to support their work. School administrators can create teaching activities and courses that are not available in SI-net to allow casual academics to be paid by schedule for these activities.
Functional Limitations
There is no integration in this release with the Aurion build (R1.1). Not until R1.3 will the data collected in this interface will be linked with the Aurion processes resulting in an integrated process for appointing/ placing casual academic staff and paying them by a planned schedule.
Release 1.1 - Limited pilot - October 2017
Release 1.1 is a pilot release involving the School of Maths and Physics and the UQ Business School for summer semester, 2017. The Schools will prepare their appointments and payment schedules in spreadsheet format. These spreadsheets will be loaded into Aurion by the Aurion support team, and the casual academics will be paid according to the schedules. Variations to the schedule will be managed by a new Aurion form for modifying the payment schedule.
Release goal and expected benefits
The value of the pilot is to identify any considerations in development, implementation and operation of the Aurion component of the solution prior to it being made available to every School. It is understood that this may result in additional work to be performed in order to scale it up to support the full enterprise. The business value of the features themselves are described below.
Functional Limitations
The loading of the schedule is a one off exercise undertaken at the start of the pilot. As a result, no new casuals can be added into the pilot, and any changes to the schedule have to be managed through the new Aurion form. Both of these limitations will be addressed in future releases.
Teams
Project Steering Group
| Name | Position |
|---|---|
| Professor Tim Dunne | Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Office of the Provost (Chair) |
| Bill Kernahan | Director, Human Resources (Business Owner) |
| Andrew Hannan | Director, Service Enhancement |
| Rob Moffatt | Chief Information Officer |
| Andrew Betts | Chief Financial Officer |
| Karen Perkins | School Manager, Psychology |
Contact
For more information about CAHP, contact the project team CAHP_support@uq.edu.au.
