BUS603: Managing People

The system has different tabs for the same window in the Web browser that constituted all the dashboards required. The first of them is the control panel, followed by the priority, after the detailed tasks' list, and the tasks' capture. Every user in the system is being configured and must be part of a category and profile. Each user's category can participate and work with one or more state changes in the workflow process, shown in the control panel. Each user's profile represents an administration level in the system, where users of read-only level, can login but not change the process' states, the users of basic level, can change the state and the tasks' features, meanwhile users with admin level, can do all before but add new users. Finally, the user of higher level (root user) also can do all before but add new admin users.

Each task has a state and a group of features (fig. 4). The state' indicators can be configured with different colors or can use a neutral color, and also can select a particular figure for a better identification. When a state is changed by user, the system requests an acknowledgement for security and process control purposes, and only is accepted if the user belongs to the category and profile required by this particular state that was previously configured. In a sense that users for a category and profile specified are able to change only this state and others with the same characteristics per configuration at the workflow. The same behavior occurs for every feature of each specific task.

Figure 4. States of tasks with key features.

When a task has concluded the overall process at the workflow, the last operation that is being executed changes the state to historic mode, then the task disappears immediately from all views in the system, giving the impression of not longer exist, but still being available to be acquired through an IR process, with the intention to perform further analysis.

In order to capture the hidden needs and specific knowledge about tasks and parts, we included a box for comments as an additional feature for every task, where users (if they require), can add any comment or extra information required to follow up a particular task through the workflow process. With this, we expect to acquire some knowledge about additional features required for tasks and parts that need to be included but are not in the prototype or in the current production version of the system, even some specific knowledge like detractors, errors, and issues found during the process, and being identified by users. After, these comments can be retrieved by other system's mechanisms like IR, for further support and exchange between participants as knowledge sharing.