Although sporting an impressive array of useful features, our home grown time clock and payroll data capture system had a few gaps. Some numbers did not match all the various rules for time benefits: PTO, accrual rates, types of family and medical leave, etc. Our primary administrative users were payroll and accounting people. Every employee in the company was an end user: clocking in and out daily, making time off requests, approving their time sheets with managers and the like.
The system included a front end web application and an iPhone app for end users, and for administrative users there was a web application that allowed them to manage time sheets, time off requests and other payroll preparation tasks.
Activity Breakdown
Audit Spreadsheet
Time Sheet
One prominent symptom was an inaccurate display of PTO hours that employees saw when requesting time off. There were numerous other issues that administrative users had to work around when preparing payroll data for processing. For many pay periods it was common to need manual corrections, rekeying of data, and extra communication with employees to fix time sheets to make payroll accurate.
A technical writer, a developer and I worked together with the HR team to document the laws and user requirements. We rewrote the system rules to make sure that the time clock system correctly calculated time off, processed requests, and passed the correct data to the payroll processing system, and added some enhancements to reporting as well. After managing the requirements gathering, design and recoding process, I led the implementation, QA, launch and training process to completion.
“Peter is known for deeply analyzing problems and fully exploring several options before setting out on a course of action.”