User:Tstamp2/sandbox

Article Evaluation (Personnel - Employee Scheduling Software)

In the very first sentence Wikipedia has noted that a citation is needed, as is also noted under the first subsection "Complexity. All in all, there are four points throughout the article where Wikipedia has noted that a citation is needed, though it looks like the information has not ever been flagged to be deleted. The "Complexity" subsection brings up a "theoretical underpinning" of a problem, but does not go into detail of how the problem affects the software. There is a link to explain the theory, but I think it is off-topic, or at least odd, to mention a vague theoretical problem and not actually show how it relates. Beyond that, there is only one other subsection and it is on-topic, though not very interesting. It gives a list of features, but could probably go into greater detail. The article is definitely neutral, as there are not many sides to be taken. It would be interesting to put in some anti-software view points for the sake of neutrality though. It lists that there could be drawbacks, but it does not go into detail in that direction of how these drawbacks have affected businesses. An addition I could see is including some sort of data showing how the software has or has not helped in a tangible way. This could be from employee retention, happiness or overall less shift swaps post-software introduction. The sources include what looks like a few research driven articles, but nothing is given number wise to show the research. The Aberdeen Group produced an article in 2011 that is used, as is an article from the New York Times. There are, in total, five sources, and they all appear to be in support of employee scheduling software. A source or two taken from the opposite spectrum would be a nice addition to add a different view point. There also could be more up to date info as the four sources listed with dates all come from 2011-2012. In my personal experience with low-level retail and restaurant jobs, there has been an explosion of employee software use since that time frame so there may be more data available now. There is only a link to one source, and it works, but through google I was able to find the other three listed articles through Kronos. The final source is a book and the ISBN is given, though the link of the ISBN does not lead anywhere within Wikipedia, if you google it the book does come up. There does not appear to be any plagiarism, but I have not given an in-depth read to the available sources so I cannot be for sure. There is nothing that is in quotes though, so it might be nice to add some better quoted material to acknowledge the value of the sources. With the amount of "citation needed" marks within the article, there may be some close paraphrasing that I have not noticed. Overall this article looks like a solid start, but far from a finished product. We need to find some more up to date sources to provide a better look into the software in the current world, rather than from five years ago.

Article Evaluation (Intro - Hollow State)

Within this article, there are no listed "citation needed," but the whole subsection of "Infrastructure" is without citation. This caught my eye because it is the longest subsection, and each other part has multiple citations. It looks as though Wikipedia users may have just allowed an edit and never went in for the "citation needed." It is definitely somewhere that we as a group can begin when editing the article. There is also a completely empty subsection labeled as "Outcomes," which provides a nice opening when editing the article. The information is on-topic, but jumps around a bit too much. It begins with "Hollow State" as an overall theory or idea across governments, but then it just starts speaking about Reagan and Bush administrations as Hollow States. It alludes to the Hollow State idea forming from the aforementioned United States administrations, but does not directly state where the theory came from or began. It would be interesting to know the origin of the idea, as if it came from the United States or if it was simply applied within the United States. I think the subsections are a bit distracting, or at least out of order. There is "History," "Infrastructure," and "Contracting" (along with the empty "Outcome"), but in my mind contracting would be within the infrastructure. As there is no "Outcome," the article appears neutral, listing the original intention, but does verge on implying that a Hollow State is inherently bad. In the introduction it lists the reason for the Hollow State as to work in the interest of hte leader, but in the "Purpose" subsection within "History," this is not the case. It speaks more on budgetary problems, creating a bit of an understanding problem. As I go from the intro, believing it a tool of dictators, into the history, I am given multiple ideas but not truly shown what is the correct idea. I think this could be remedied by cleaning up the introduction to include more ideas from the rest of the article. As it stands the introduction is in stark contrast to the History section. There are five sources, though one is just a link to a jstor article, with no title or author given. Two of the sources are books, one titled directly with Hollow State, and the last two are articles. The jstor link brings up "Review Nonprofit Contracting and the Hollow State" by H. Brinton Milward and Jennifer Welch, and from the link it looks to be a review of a number of works about the Hollow State idea. The article with a direct link is also by Milward, along with Keith Provan, and this looks to be the best source from the abstract. All appear as data driven and neutral studies of hollow states, though that is from a brief view. Overall, I think the focus on the United States administrations is overrepresented, and I would like to see more examples outside of our government. If they do not exist, then that should also be specifically stated. The citations are all from before 2006, some as far back as 1993, so it would worthwhile to look into newer data about the Hollow State. Due to the listing of Reagan and Bush as apart of the Hollow State, there may be some more information now that we are two and three decades away from their institution of such ideas.

Annotated Sources - Personnel

1. Shujin Qin, Shixin Liu, and Hanbin Kuang, “Piecewise Linear Model for Multiskilled Workforce Scheduling Problems considering Learning Effect and Project Quality,” Mathematical Problems in Engineering, vol. 2016, Article ID 3728934, 11 pages, 2016. doi:10.1155/2016/3728934

This article focuses on how scheduling software can better facilitate workers who have multiple skills and in complex workforces. The research looks at how the scheduling model utilizes the assignment of tasks based on, among other factors, the requirements of the project. The conclusion is that such scheduling models, looking at production costs and efficiency, work in the short term projects, but that further research is needed for long term scheduling.

2. Robidoux, L. & Donnelly, P. (2011). Automated employee scheduling: Welcome to the future. Nursing Management, 42 (12), 41-43. doi: 10.1097/01.NUMA.0000407580.30932.ce

Laura Robidoux is a nurse manager and Pat Donnelly is the chief nursing officer at BayCare Health System, so they are have a level of expertise to respect. This article discusses how the healthcare industry, despite being on the the edge of innovation across the board, was late to utilize employee scheduling software. The process of scheduling at BayCare is so specified by department that an automated process would have to be extremely intricate to take every factor into account, and there are even daily decisions on where each employee will serve to be to the best help to the hospital. Once implemented, and the bugs worked out, the fluidity of not only scheduling but also requesting time off became indispensable. This has lead to increased productivity due to less time needed for scheduling, increased transparency for the workers and management, and better accountability.

3. Weber, N., & Patten, L. (2005). Shoring Up for Efficiency. Health Management Technology, 26 (1), 34-36.

Weber and Patten discuss a hospital that already has employee scheduling, but that needs an update to their software to increase efficiency. Due to a growing employee base, the old software could not accommodate the new codes for employees, and so the hospital looked at a more flexible software. Labor, paper and internal agency costs were all dramatically reduced, including the fact that standing employees for vacancies within the schedule required only 10% of the original number (from 190 on call to 19).

4. Stedman, C. (1999). Retail Scheduling Systems Get Makeovers. Computerwolrd, 33(2), 14.

Stedman looks at how retail stores integrated new software into their already existing scheduling practices in order to best accommodate the needs of the company. The speed of the software dramatically increased, along with the ability to better plan for needs at specific times. The need for improvement remains, as Stedman states that the company wishes for more work-place analysis and the ability for employees to better interact with the software.

5. Cohan, J. (1993). Casino hits jackpot with employee scheduling software. Personnel Journal, 72(5), 8.

This article focuses on the implementation of a new scheduling software at a casino. After being introduced, there were immediate cost savings as better rotations of employees become available. No longer would there be a shuffle of workers, but rather a more integrated system where everyone would work at the times best for them and the company. The features also allowed for payroll automation, saving on costs in a variety of manners.

Annotated Sources - Intro

1. Smith, G. (2010). The Hollow State: Rural Governance in China. The China Quarterly, (203), 601-618.
2. The hollow state. (2015). Economist, 417(8969), 59-61.
   1. South Africa has been trending toward a Hollow State as the President has empowered business interests over his own government and people.
3. Terry, L. D. (2005). The Thinning of Administrative Institutions in the Hollow State. Administration & Society, 37(4), 426-444. doi:10.1177/0095399705277136
4. Bryer, T. t.(2008). Warning: The Hollow State Can Be Deadly. Public Administration Review, 68(3), 587-590. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6210.2008.00896.x
5. Cohen, L. S. (2010). [A Government Out of Sight]. Social History,35(2), 221-223.

Wikipedia Proposal - Employee Scheduling Software

• Lead Paragraph -see info on lead paragraphs-
  • -How to clean- /em-ploi-ee skej-ool sawft-wair/
    • Move the information that should be in other sections such as the ERP package reference. Expand on the lead to make it more pertinent to the article.
• Development
  • Older forms
    • Hand Written
    • Punch cards Punched card
  • Transition
    • With the rising costs of fixed assets and the increased time required to start up machinery, it became more financially sound for certain industries, such as steel mills, iron foundries and textile mills, to have non-stop production. At this time the first traditional models of workforce scheduling appeared, splitting up workers into rotating day and night shift groups. The first schedules were very simple and consisted of working 12 hour shifts with half the staff scheduled to work at night, and the remaining staff scheduled to work during the day. This workforce scheduling would continue for 13 straight days per employee with 1 day off before being scheduled for the opposite shift;<>

• • Use
    • development of model/algorithm
    • History: The origin of staff scheduling and rostering can be traced back to Edie’s work on traffic delays at toll booths.
    • mobile
    • multi-skilled workers benefit from scheduling software as it best puts together experience/skill combinations
  • Possible future
    • Chart for patents
    • Robot retirement homes
  • Purpose of Employee Scheduling Software:
    • Purpose: Ultimately, optimization of scheduling to minimize costs. Optimized staff schedules can provide enormous benefits, but require carefully implemented decision support systems if an organization is to meet customer demands in a cost effective manner while satisfying requirements such as flexible workplace agreements, shift equity, staff preferences, and part-time work. Also to overcome limitations by integrating labor requirements and scheduling decisions to minimize costly staffing and scheduling errors.
    • Process of Scheduling:
      • Process of Scheduling:
        • a. Demand modeling: Determining how many staff members, with particular skills, are needed at different times over some period needed to meet the service demand.
          • i. Demand modeling is the process of translating some predicted pattern of incidents into associate duties and then using the duty requirements to ascertain a demand for staff. There are three broad categories on which staff demands can be based.
            • 1.Task based demand: Demand is obtained from lists of individual tasks to be performed. Tasks are defined in terms of a starting time and duration, or a time window in which the task must be completed.
            • 2. Flexible demand: When the likelihood of future incidents is less well known a model must be implemented that uses forecasting techniques. Requests for service may have random arrival dates and possibly random service times.
            • 3. Shift based demand: Demand is obtained directly from a specification of the number of staff that are required to be on duty during different shifts. This type of scheduling may be common in nurse or ambulance services.
          • b. Days off Scheduling: This module involves a determination of how rest days are to be interspersed between work days for different lines of work.
          • c. Shift Scheduling: Shift scheduling deals with the problem of selecting, from a potentially large pool of candidates, what shifts are to be worked, together with an assignment of the number of employees to each shift, in order to meet demand.
          • d. Line of work construction: This involves the creation of lines of work, which are sometimes referred to as work schedules or roster lines, spanning the rostering horizon for each staff member.
          • e. Task management: It may be necessary to assign one or more tasks to be carried out during each shift. These tasks may require particular staff skills or levels of seniority and must therefore be associated with particular lines of work.
          • f. Staff Assignment: Individual staff members are allocated shifts so as to meet the required staffing levels at different times.

• Complexity
  • 3. Complexity: Employee Scheduling software uses algorithms to determine duties. Typically, when issues arise for this reason the final stages of scheduling are “performed manually”.
    • The following are three main factors that influence the differences between roster problems and models:
      • i. The degree to which days off scheduling, line of work construction and task assignment are integrated. An appropriate decomposition strategy can reduce the modelling complexity.
      • ii. The modules required constructing a roster. Some problems do not have tasks, others require non-trivial demand modeling, and some, such as crew scheduling and rostering, do not require task assignment.
      • iii. The type of demand and the fundamental unit from which lines of work are constructed. For example, the modeling techniques used for airline crew rostering are very different from those used for call center rostering. The demand for the former is based on fixed tasks and on flexible tasks for the latter.
    • b. Each industry sector has its own set of issues and must be viewed in its own right.
    • c. Additionally, it is difficult to determine optimal solution that minimize costs, meet employee preferences, distribute shifts equitably among employees and satisfy all the workplace constraints. In many organizations, the people involved in developing rosters need decisions support tools to help provide the right employees at the right time and the right cost while achieving a high level of employee satisfaction.
    • Describe problems
    • Closing-open
    • Flexible for new employees
    • Specified software for nursers/doctors/servers/etc.
  • Solutions/Outcomes/Future Trends
    • Currently, models and algorithms often require significant modification when they are to be transferred to a different application area, or to accommodate changes within an organisation. In a continually changing environment it is not desirable to have an organisation’s internal structures, processes and work policies hard-wired into models, algorithms and software for personnel scheduling. New models need to be formulated that provide more flexibility to accommodate individual workplace practices. This can then lead to the development of more general algorithms that will be more robust to changes in the rostering requirements.
    • Upgrade/Updates can fix fluidity issues in regards to adding employees and analysis tools
    • Individualized software packages, such as a casino or hospital
• Features
  • Expand
    • Switch paragraphs to bullet list with sentences:
      • Gantt chart
      • Payroll
      • Workplace analysis
• See Also
  • Expand on list
• References

Gallie D (1978) In Search of the New Working Class: Automation and Social Integration within the Capitalist Enterprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

These all Apply to History and Development

13.         Essinger, James (2004). Jacquard's Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280577-0.

14.         Trogemann, Georg (eds.); et al. (2001). Computing in Russia. Verlag. pp. 47–49. The article is by Gellius N. Povarov, titled Semen Nikolayevich Korsakov- Machines for the Comparison of Philosophical Ideas

15.       Lubar, Steven, 1991, Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate: A Cultural History of the Punch Card, Smithsonian Institution

16.       "IBM Archive: Endicott card manufacturing". 03.ibm.com. Retrieved 2013-10-05.

17.       Lubar, Steven (1993). InfoCulture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions. Houghton Mifflin. p. 302. ISBN 0-395-57042-5.

18.       Aspray (ed.), W. (1990). Computing before Computers. Iowa State University Press. p. 151. ISBN 0-8138-0047-1.

Work Plan

• Peer Review- Due 11/28
• Group Meeting- TBA
• Final Article Revision- Due 12/2
• Final Group Meeting- TBA
• Presentation- Due 12/5 or 12/7

Hayden: Development

Travis: Features

Hunter: Intro and See Also

Trevor: Complexity

All: References