KU announces November employees of the month

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas has announced the November 2014 Employees of the Month. They are as follows:

Name: Lisa Adams

Start date: Aug. 18, 1990

Title: Information Systems analyst, Human Resources

What that means: Adams provides assistance with KU Medical Center partners while holding a demanding workload of her own. Currently Adams is a crucial member of the KU team working with the implementation of the State Employee Health Portal system. In this position Adams became part of the implementation team to update the Lawrence and Medical Center campuses to the new HR/Pay PeopleSoft system. To do this required hours of evaluating and testing processes for configurations, upgrades, service packs, problem solving and enhancements to the system to fit KU and the State’s business needs. All this necessitated testing and then validation of results, often creating multiple configurations to achieve a desired outcome. This endeavor also involved a broad spectrum of interactions with developers, functional leaders and staff members to address issues and develop increased functionality for users.

Notable: Adams was a key leader in the successful transition of moving benefits table and employee data during the reimplementation. When it was determined that a few of the key benefits tables could not be moved accurately, Adams jumped in with Med Center partners and entered the data. After the implementation, Adams was instrumental in leveraging a delivered process for prepaid deductions for faculty and reducing the necessity for costly, complicated modifications to a minor modification. Adams was part of a team that spent hours solving problems, answering hundreds of phone calls and emails and assisting with walk-in customers while validating benefits and other HR data.

Name: Annie Jatala

Start date: March 6, 2013

Title: Project coordinator, the Achievement & Assessment Institute

What that means: In this role Jatala is an integral member of the Governance and Logistics team and is responsible for managing conferences, events and meetings on behalf of the Dynamic Learning Maps Project (DLM). This project is a 19-state consortium developing large-scale online assessments for students with significant cognitive disabilities. She also provides support for test development projects and to the DLM associate director, including planning, identifying deliverables and tracking to completion, budgeting, and addressing staff space and equipment needs.  

Notable: Last summer she provided extensive support for a complex and rapidly evolving item writing project. This involved the addition of a staff of 40 temporary employees needing to be located on campus for eight weeks. She handled everything, including finding space, training, technology support and special events. The previous summer she did the same for an item-writing project involving 110 temporary employees, and in this instance she handled housing needs for teachers from out-of-state. A more recent example of Jatala’s willingness to go above-and-beyond for the Institute was during its first field test of new assessments. This project involved 11,000 students across 13 states. Significant technology issues during implementation quickly overwhelmed the Help Desk, and Jatala immediately volunteered to help. This was a period of tremendous pressure, but she always provided levelheaded customer service and helped to ease the state partners’ concerns.