Highlights
- Analyzed system interfaces between timekeeping platforms during a major tech upgrade affecting 17K employees.
- Documented process flows and integration points to support transition planning and improve system interoperability.
- Facilitated collaboration between business stakeholders and technical teams through clear, structured documentation.
Why was this project pursued?
As the primary / golden source of time collection, our application (VzTime - a customized installation of Infor Workforce Management (formerly Workbrain) interfaced with many different other systems to support critical operations surrounding timesheets, and ultimately, people getting paid.
Current state analysis was required on interface processes to better understand the interconnectivity our our system with other related systems so that knowledge and documentation of these processes could be captured for later usage of application upgrades and/or improvements.
What was the methodology?
- “Get my arms around” - gather as much quantitative data on interfacing applications as possible: use data analysis techniques to gather metrics of impacted employees; interview application SMEs to better understand the purpose and history of applications; access the interfaced applications directly to capture screenshots of functionality and processes.
- Investigate - dive into technical details of the actual interfaces within our system: gather information of job scheduler and configurations of jobs; break down related processing, re-formatting, and error-handling tasks to their smallest levels; take note of technical artifacts listed, such as java classes, shell scripts, server .csv files etc; organize screenshots.
- Translate - make sense of any mentioned code and scripts, and explain the high-level purpose in easy-to-read words.
- Compile - organize gathered knowledge and screenshots and document processes into and logical flow to provide a easy-to-read overview of the interfacing applications.
- Communicate - deliver findings to stakeholders.
What were the results?