Document Classification Workshop 2019 July 10

Date: Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Time: 2:00-4:00 pm

Location: BLU 9920

Overview

The document classification workshop for Faculties and FR had three main goals:

To create the awareness of what an electronic document management system is
Let the participants understand why eTRACS team is doing this project
Establish an agreed-upon top level classification of the documents involved in a Research Faculty member's lifecycle

Participants from all eight faculties, Faculty Relations (FR) and Vice President Academic (VPA) office attended the workshop. The format of the workshop was interactive and multiple timed activities were planned in order to give the the participants the opportunity to discuss, negotiate and build a classification which would be widely accepted by all faculties and Faculty Relations.

The facilitator, Jennifer Casey, provided enthusiastic instructions to guide the participants to come up with an agreed top level classification of the documents. A lot of participants were interested in the project and raised some important questions to the eTRACS project team (see Part 6) for consideration. After addressing some of those questions, the workshop ended at 4:00 pm.

Part 1 - Introduction and Project Background

The workshop started off with a brief review of the project background as below:

In 2016, Faculty Relations identified a need for digitizing faculty personnel files due to the enormous number of documents and space limitations in their office.
Faculty Relations, Faculties and IT project resources attended some product demonstrations to get more in-depth knowledge of those commercial off-the-shelf products’ capabilities and functionalities and they would like to use OnBase as their document repository system
OnBase is also being used as the Document Management System by Student Services (admissions) and Finance departments at Simon Fraser University.

What is a Document Management System?

Document management system is a computer system to handle all activities in a document’s lifespan including few significant stages (Creation, Distribution & Use, Storage & Maintenance, Retention and Disposal).

Web Survey Results of the 'As-is' Document Management Practices

The workshop presented the web survey results on how documents are currently managed among the faculties and Faculty Relations. The web survey and show of hands at the workshop demonstrated that physical files are still widely used along with electronic files stored in network drives.

The web survey results revealed the needs of implementing a document management system in university-wide as below:

Stored in a centralized place
Reduce search and retrieval time for documents
Retention policy of documents to be implemented automatically
Reduce paper and physical space

Main Goal of this workshop

Establish an agreed-upon top-level classification of the documents involved in a Research Faculty member’s life cycle (i.e. Professor, Associate Professor, Assistant Professor and Instructor)

Part 2 - Document Classification Exercises

First Round - Categorization

The participants from eight faculties, Faculty Relations and VPA office were divided into four groups. Each group was with nine or more people and it was diversely composed of representatives from two to four faculties plus at least one representative from Faculty Relations. The purpose of this grouping method was to encourage the cross-faculty collaborations on document management practices with the support from Faculty Relations representative(s). Each group would have the same sets of sticky notes on the table which were simulating over seventy-five different document types in reality and the participants were given 30 minutes to discuss and create classification buckets to organize those sticky notes. They were also given the opportunity to write additional document types as needed.

The goal of the first document classification activity was for each group to come up with a top level classification of the document types in the sample pool.

Second Round - Creating Coalitions

After the coffee break, the rules of how to form the first coalition was introduced by the facilitator. In the first coalition, four groups would be merged into two groups which Group 1 and Group 3 formed a coalition and Group 2 and 4 formed another. The coalitions were given 20 minutes to consolidate the same categories, to re-name the categories if needed and to drop or add some new categories through further discussion. Then, two new top level classifications were formulated by the groups.

Results after first coalition

Final Round - Top Level Classification

In the final round, the classifications from the two coalitions were collected and compared side by side. With the help of the facilitator, the repeated categories had been selected and put into the final list directly. For the remaining different categories, lots of discussion, negotiation and concession on how to name, keep or discard the categories was carried out among the participants. After a final list was compiled, the facilitator asked the participants to show hands if they agreed with this classification. All of the participants raised their hands and demonstrated concensus. Therefore, an agreed-upon top level classification of the documents has been built and the goal of the workshop was achieved. Way to go teams!

Final Merge Result in Diagram

Part 3 - What's Next?

This top level document classification was just the starting point. There is still a lot of work to do relating to document categorization, the keywords/ metadata associated with those document types, retention and disposal policies, access control, a conversion strategy and other appointments apart from research faculty members. There is tremendous work upcoming for this revolutionary change for the faculties and FR in handling documents! The eTRACS team will be starting the employee file view and building the full solution piece by piece. Stay tuned!

Part 6 - Questions and Answers during the workshop

Is OnBase going to be a separate system from eTRACS? We will be integrating OnBase with eTRACS and using eTRACS's sophisticated access control configuration to help with document access in OnBase.
What about duplication of documents? We understood the employee files are currently stored in faculties, VPA office and FR repeatedly and so we have to create a conversion strategy in the near future that may involve a strategic plan outlining who will be the one to upload and organize which documents to prevent document duplication to the system.
FR is relying on faculties/departments for teaching evaluations (which determines parts of salary review). For Teaching evaluation, it belongs to other eTRACS Module rather than document management, please contact eTRACS team for more information.
What is the timeline for this project? By the end of year, the system will have the capability to upload, retrieve and view documents through eTRACS.
Will I be able to view a list of faculty members and their workload, etc.? This requirement is more related to the reporting capabilities of eTRACS, not document system. Yes, there will be future reporting capabilities down the road.
Will we (faculties) be leading workflows to creating/uploading the documents? For the first step, the functionalities of handling documents in eTRACS will be focusing on uploading, retrieving and viewing documents. Automation with workflow will come in later phase.
Will we (Faculty Relations) have some separate buckets /classification from the standard (faculties one)? For easier to manage and to reduce the complexity in the initial development, there should be only one top level classification. But for FR's specific documents, they can be separated by access control which faculties cannot see or even notice the existence of those documents if access is only granted to FR staff. Or the documents can be further classified by metadata/ tagging or keywords.
Will eTRACS team help to do the backdate scanning or conversion? eTRACS team will provide the platform (system) for faculties to upload/ retrieve/ view/ delete or edit the documents and act like a consultant role for document management e.g. access control, retention, keywords, conversion strategies and etc but not responsible for individual faculty or FR's physical copy scanning/conversion. But the eTRACS team will assist to implement the automation of indexing when there are bulk backdate scanning/ conversion and will work out a feasible plan with the faculties/ FR.
Economics department volunteers to be test pilot.

Please don't worry if your question raised in the workshop was not listed above, please contact us directly and we will response to you. Last but not least, thank you to all those who attended as you had provided valuable understanding of your document management practices. We hope you enjoyed the session and welcome any feedback! Feel free to provide a response at the bottom of this page or contact fitsba@sfu.ca directly with your feedback.

Thank you also to Jennifer Casey, Director of Digital Transformation, and Maggie Lee, Digital Transformation Office Analyst, for being our Facilitators!