Team Awards
Congratulations to all our winners!
Kronos Team (ITS and central HRE)
Brenda Bannis
Nicholas Prashad
Kelly Gao
Barbara Der
Christina Tsang
Parvis Moinipour
Zac Ryan
Joy Li all from ITS
and from Central HR: Sheryl Vitug
What started out as a grassroots application to get rid of a whole lot of paper and stress around payroll deadlines, has now turned into a movement. We are talking about the university wide enthusiasm for a new HR application called Kronos which uses electronic timesheets to conveniently record hours worked for biweekly paid staff. Seamless transfer of this information to the HRIS payroll system completes the magic. In the words of one of our payroll administrators – My life is totally different, I smile more, and I can now go on vacation … sweet!! “. Through a variety of creative outreach activities including demonstrations, implementation guides, videos, on-site training, and standard negotiated contract terms for the university, the HRIS team, along with committed partners such as Food Services, has made this application a runaway success with over 1,900 employees now using the system.
Room Assignment Team (ACE)
Andy Allen
Anthony Morra
Deepika Tayl
Diane Lekas
This intrepid band of schedulers embarked on a journey to overhaul the University’s decades old inefficient, antiquated and inequitable method for allocating classroom space. In order to address these challenges the ACE team members working with a facilitator engaged a cross divisional group of stakeholders in a process streamline exercise. This resulted in a shift to a consolidated and integrated criteria based approach to room allocation. For the first time in decades, the University will be able to see all the academic requests for the term at the same time and make rational rooming decisions based on what the course and students require. As one of academic leaders said at a presentation to Principals and Deans, “It’s about time”
Info Security Education Campaign (ITS)
Tamara Bahr
Tamara Adizes-Jacobs
Chloe Payne
Alex Cybulski
Mike Wiseman
Rajiv Kaushik
Marden Paul
The University’s Policy on Information Security and the Protection of Digital Assets calls for “educating the University community on digital security best practices…”A team in the CIO Office developed the campaign framework and brought in a project leader to develop the pedagogical methods to run the campaign. The project leader worked with a multi-faceted team of security experts, communicators, and technology leaders from across the University to design the program and its delivery approach. Four target audiences were defined – students, faculty, staff, and IT experts. The creative team produced posters, ran pop-up booths and even developed a Jeopardy! Security game.
The program was well received in the community as well as the broader University sector who have borrowed many of the ideas and plans developed here.
Project Management Drawings Initiative (UPDC)
Audrey Vince
Vanessa Miraples
Sarah Kelly
Drawings of University buildings and renovations over many decades have been stored in several storage rooms on campus. Given its size, this resource of over 10,000 drawings and documents has been largely inaccessible. Organization of this collection required an understanding of archiving and storage with an emphasis on retrieval. This team developed plans for maintaining and adding to the existing inventory. In the first year, over 4800 rolls (equivalent to 40,000 pages) were handled, sorted, reviewed and tagged for next step. This is a multi-year project that has greatly enhanced our ability to retrieve documents essential to new projects, and uncovered historical documents which more appropriately belong in University archives. To the team, this project is not about handling old, dusty, forgotten pieces of paper, velum or blueprint. It is about respectfully reviewing and considering information for relevance and historical perspective. Vanessa, Sarah and Audrey do this with commitment, excitement, ingenuity and happiness.
OUAC Team (ITS)
June Cheng
Matthew Hendrickson
Gaye Wignall
Diana Augustin
Dharmesh Amalsadia
Nicky Lai
Blair Thomson
Sometimes it’s the projects that you don’t hear that much about that truly demonstrate the exemplary commitment of our staff. In this case we are referring to a small programming team within EASI who quietly and competently implemented a new province-wide interface for the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre (OUAC). Required system changes were extensive for both ROSI and associated applications such as ACORN. And of course, failure was not an option when it comes to student applications. Tight deadlines and constantly changing requirements by the province kept our team on its toes (some say on edge) requiring countless late nights at the office. Many very positive comments regarding the skill and perseverance of our programmers were received during this project. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the U of T was instrumental in ensuring the overall success of this project for OUAC and the province.
Student Accounts project (ITS and central Financial Services)
Kim Chan
Svetlana Opachevsky
John Bassani
Andrey Pletnev
Dana Pogaceanu
Patrick Boal
Richard Chow
Santino Ardizzi
Bruce Hoppe
Kun Chai
Paul Littlefield
Ken Tsang
Bruce Zhu
Haroon Rafique
Paul Day
Evan Moir
Petru Sugarall from ITS,
and from Financial Services:
Lorena Gaudio
Audrey Cheung and
Ruth Bonifaz
Do ROSI and FIS balance? Lost student payments! Impossibly large amounts of paper to sort through at month-end! These were just a few of the issues the NGSIS – SAP student accounts project was to address. But this project turned out to be a lot bigger than we originally thought. By the time SAP student accounts was implemented in December 2016, over one million financial transactions and 170,000 student records were moved from ROSI into SAP to leverage FIS reporting capabilities. And according to a “tired team” – it was all worthwhile. New reporting capabilities on FIS have introduced significant time savings for staff – and – yes – ROSI and FIS do balance, and student payments can now be quickly traced, and best of all, more than 2.75 tons of paper have been eliminated per year. This was an enormously complex project and to the best of our knowledge, a first of its kind within higher education.
VPUO HR, food services insourcing HR support (UOHR)
Erin Noble
Janel Nguyen
Bellmia Ravindran
Monica Seymour
The HR team in University Operations has been an invaluable partner to the food services department over the past year. As we transitioned from a team of 5 to a team of over 200, Desma and her group have been there to support the growth every step of the way, taking extra time with our new leaders to ensure every question was answered, and each new hourly employee felt welcomed to their new U of T family. Often faced with tight timelines for recruitment and operational support, it was most impressive to witness how this team came together to face each challenge head on, stepping outside their individual areas of responsibility to assist each other with job development, employee relations and the mountain of recruitment that always seemed to be urgent. Throughout, they were positive, unbelievably well organized, and a great pleasure to work with.