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HR Review Implementation

Foundational: Position Management Project

Position management is used to define a role within an organizational structure and to manage the attributes of that role. Position management coordinates three components: Position (a job independent of an employee), plus a Person (an employee), to create a Job (the union of a position and a person).  McMaster University is committed to providing accurate staffing and position information. All changes to staffing and position information is made through the online Mosaic HR system. The Position Management project works to clean up pre-existing data and improve processes for creating and modifying positions to allow for effective workforce planning and reporting and related budget forecasting and planning.

Many of PeopleSoft’s capabilities can be optimized when there is a one-to-one relationship between employee and Position. Having multiple employees on a position can cause confusion when position attributes need to be updated. In addition, having multiple employees on a position is the greatest cause of corrections needed to the Department Budget Table (DBT).

Outcomes

  • Improve data quality and reduce the need for data corrections
  • Enhance user experience
  • Streamline processes for recruiting and hiring Faculty and Staff.
  • Reduce risk of errors to the Department Budget Table (DBT)
  • Improve employee life cycle reporting, turnover analysis & recruitment metrics

Approach

  • Identify where a one-to-one setup for employees and positions is applicable
  • Clean up vacant positions to determine if they can be changed to inactive
  • Review and clean-up of position attributes (including chartfield/combination code)
  • Review of HR and Finance Security

Accomplishments

  • Position-based configuration vs employee-based configuration
  • Enabling for full optimization of PeopleSoft capabilities
  • Cleaned up to 20,000 employee records
  • Deactivated over 6,000 positions
  • Chartfield and department budget tables (DBT) corrected
  • Updated documentation of process driving payroll calculations
  • Set the stage for eForm capabilities to prevent chart

Position Management Toolkit

For an in-depth guide detailing the changes of the Position Management project, check out the Position Management Toolkit.