Dear SHARE:
Happy New Fiscal Year! The summer has been a tremendously busy one for SHARE. We have an extremely busy hiring season that has been more than challenging due to UCPath. We are not pointing fingers, but we are. Here are two important pieces of information.
1) UCPath/HR Processing Times
You may or may not realize this, but there is a large organization called the UCPath Center (UCPC) in Riverside, CA that employs a few hundred people to review and approve all transactions in UCPath, for all campuses. Their employees are mostly new and unevenly trained. We get very inconsistent answers to questions and their processing times range from 5-10 days to look at a transaction. Sometimes they kick it back and the process starts again. We expect a campus-wide communication about this to come from the UCPath change management team sometime soon, but want you all to be aware of this. We are doing everything we can to get your HR work completed yet most of the delays are due to issues out of our control.
We are not able to provide a realistic estimate of processing time for transactions due to this variability at UCPC. We are escalating this to the Office of the President, but do not expect it to change until all campuses have gone live on UCPath, by May 2020. They are expected to hire and train over 300 people during this fiscal year.
In the meantime, we would like to partner with you to document the processes that impact your area the most. We are putting together small working groups to come up with the most efficient way to handle your requests in the new system. If you’d like to volunteer for a working group, please sign up here
2) SHARE Physical Location
After months and months of negotiating with departments and other stakeholders in more than 60 meetings, it has become clear that the obstacles to moving the region into the basement of Barrows Hall are insurmountable. Please trust us that we have tried everything in our power to make this happen. For a brief moment in time we considered having a small space in Barrows, which could serve as an outpost we would use to rotate RA and HR stuff through on a daily basis. Due to feedback from you we have scrapped this idea. The campus administration was also not excited for us to take up space in two locations for the same people. So for the near term, our HR and Purchasing staff will be located on the second floor of the 4th street building. They like the space and are all together in the same location for the first time ever! This has already led to tremendous synergies and team building. RAs will remain in the Banway building on Bancroft and Oxford - very close to campus.
We will make our staff available to you by phone, Zoom or in person. The important thing is that the work gets done and gets done well. We are confident that we are on the right track. We have informed Lisa Alvarez-Cohen that the long run space planning for campus has to include adequate space on campus for our 50 or so staff.
Thank you for your patience and help in adjusting to UCPath. We are hopeful that by working together, we can improve any aspects within our control, and collectively escalate the issues outside of our control.
Kind regards,
Teal and Max