Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Waterloo launches HeForShe campaign

More than 290 attendees joined President Feridun Hamdullahpur to kick off the University of Waterloo's HeForShe IMPACT 10X10X10 campaign on Tuesday morning. More information about the international gender equity campaign can be found on the President's website.

A look into the complexity of WaterlooWorks

By Stephanie Tortorici.

WaterlooWorks™ has been used by architecture students, employers, and a group of Co-operative Education & Career Action (CECA) staff since spring 2014. Each term, additional functionality is used by the group, which has first gone through a rigorous process of testing, knowledge transfer, and configurability before being implemented. The group is asked to provide feedback based on their experiences in the production setting to help CECA continue to develop the system. This feedback is summarized at the end of the term. It is then reviewed, assessed, and often developed the following term.

The entire testing and implementation process is extremely important, especially for a project as large and complex as WaterlooWorks, but is also time consuming.

About every two weeks, Orbis (the WaterlooWorks vendor) provides CECA with a new version of WaterlooWorks (a “build”), which is put into a test environment. Each build typically contains fixes for issues discovered in a previous build, as well as additional functionality.  Before the build can be released for testing, it must first be configured to align with CECA’s business requirements. Then, a team of analysts test the build against rigorous standards. Any issues are placed in an “issue log” are prioritized and sent back to Orbis. This cycle occurs multiple times throughout the term. Then, once per term, a build is deployed to production and implemented for the architecture group. Training and process documentation are also updated based on the new or enhanced functionality.  

Adding to our complexity is the desire to have a deep and complete understanding of all of the functionality and configuration options. Orbis’ software is highly configurable with many different options and settings, allowing it to be tuned to meet unique business requirements and present a customized offering to the end user. This also allows us to be self-sufficient in making changes to the software as our processes and requirements change.

In some cases, we need to make modifications to the Orbis software package – mainly due to our size, service teams, and self-serve principle. In these situations, instead of asking Orbis to customize and maintain the software specifically for us (which has a high cost), they build the ability into their existing software as a configurable option. The traditional system development lifecycle approaches don’t account for this, so we have to evolve our own: we discuss a concept with Orbis, they assess how that will be built within their existing framework and how it needs to be configurable so that any customer can choose to turn this on or off.  While this gives us the most flexibility and lowest cost solution in the long run, it takes more time initially. 

An example of a modification due to our size appears when employers are screening applications. Unless a student’s application status is specifically changed to “Not Selected”, they may think they are still being considered for the position. However, as part of Orbis’ standard software, changing the application status is a manual process that must be done for each application individually. This is an issue unique to Waterloo – while most institutions have less than 500 students in their co-op programs altogether, some of our employers get upwards of that many applications for each of their job postings.

A project as large and complex as WaterlooWorks comes with a set of challenges. Over the next few months, we’ll share more information about the project and give stakeholders an in-depth look at what we’ve been doing. If you have any questions about the project or suggestions as to what you’d like us to share in the Daily Bulletin, contact us via email.

For more information about the project, visit CECA’s Systems Site, or ‘like’ the WaterlooWorks student panel.

Wellness Walk hits the road this month

The Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is running the Sixth Annual Wellness Walk from Tuesday, May 19 to Friday, June 12.  

Last year more than 350 employees including teams from our main campus and the satellite campuses, walked over 54,444.5 kilometres.

"Let's do it again!" says a note from the EAP. "Talk to your colleagues and friends, put your walking shoes on, and start counting. You can participate individually or as part of a team." 

Register online, map your route and track your steps or kilometres. To register, visit The EAP website. Participants can use a pedometer or utilize online tools such as www.mapmyrun.com or the mapmyrun.com mobile app for iPhone, Blackberry, and Android. Simply turn on your phone's GPS feature and start walking. 

"Last year, 76 Waterloo teams took part, made up of 367 walkers from Waterloo's main campus and our satellite campuses," says the EAP. "Let's see those numbers rise!"

Participants can register as an individual or as part of the team by visiting the EAP website and clicking on the Wellness Walk logo. Prizes will be awarded for the best-performing teams and individuals.

Anyone with questions is invited to contact Melissa Zapletal or other members of the EAP Steering Committee.  

Wednesday's notes

The “drop/add begins” date for upper-year students for the fall 2015 term has been changed to Monday, July 27.

There will be a utility shutdown in the Optometry building on Friday, May 8 from 5:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. as emergency maintenance on high voltage switches is carried out. Plant Operations notes that all computer equipment in the building should be shut down in an orderly fashion the night before.

The proposed ring road disruption that was scheduled to go ahead this week as construction materials were unloaded near Engineering 3 has been postponed until Thursday, May 14 and Friday, May 15.

The Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE) has announced its latest lineup of workshops, including:

• CTE744: Cultivating Learning Cultures with guest Dr. Kathy Takayama, Wednesday, May 20, 9:15 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.
• CTE743: What’s up with IF-AT?, Wednesday, June 10, 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.
• CTE601: Instructional Skills Workshop scheduled August 18 to 21.  This is a limited enrolment 24-hours workshop.
• CTE656: Getting Started with LEARN, Thursday, August 27, 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Instructions on how to sign up are available on the CTE website.

Employers on campus next week hosting employer information sessions include: Motorola Mobility, Swiss Reinsurance, Top Hat, Google, Influitive, NVIDIA, Hearsay Social, Microsoft Canada Inc., TransCanada Pipelines Limited, Maluuba Inc., Infusion, Desjardins General Insurance Group, CIBC Technology, Bloomberg LP, Autodesk, Palantir Technologies, Twitter and Genesys Telecommunications Lab.