Oakland Unified School District (OUSD)
On-Boarding Project and Contracting Project
Overview
The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) comprises 363 Elementary, Middle, and High Schools; Alternative Schools; Charter Schools; Childhood Development Centers; and Adult Education Programs. It serves nearly 39,000 students and has over 4,800 employees.
A complex interweaving of budgeting approval and review processes including mandated procedures governed the way in which teachers and other employees were hired and rehired, and service providers were contracted. OUSD relied on disparate methodologies and individual expertise within multiple departments to carry this out every year, at some risk of miscommunication and delays. OUSD recognized a need to modernize and formalize these processes electronically.
OUSD contracted xRM to provision and host Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and realize customizations of Dynamics CRM under the direction of OUSD system planners across two projects. The On-boarding project covered the hiring process for employees, and the Contracting project covered the contracting of services.
Project goals included replacement of unwieldy paper trails with auditable electronic records, centralization of new data input methods, integration of CRM with a non-replaceable legacy data warehousing system as well as external systems including IFAS and EdJoin, creation of an internet portal allowing applicants to enter personal information and upload work verification and other employment documents securely, human-resource-department tracking of throughput volume, dashboards for managers including flagging of time-threshold violations in applicant processing, automatic silent checking against a sensitive no-rehire list, improved tracking of related documents and information such as contracts and funding programs including narrow-case restricted funds, workflow automation and tracking of decisions involving all decision makers in the chain of approval at the right time for each in the hiring-and-funding process, and overall improved efficiency.