Configuring a Schedule for Joint Appointments

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During the academic year, faculty members may hold multiple appointments across departments, colleges, or other units. Handling input from each of these appointment's committees may be captured in the faculty member's review process. The Joint Appointment feature facilitates this by allowing candidates with single and multiple appointments to be included as candidates within the same workflow schedule, creating a comprehensive review process by gathering equal input from all of a faculty member's appointments.

The Joint Appointment feature is optional and must be set per Schedule prior to confirmation/launch as it cannot be enabled or disabled afterwards. Without this feature enabled, only input from the candidate's primary appointment will be considered in the review process.

Prerequisites for enablement

To start using the joint appointment feature, make sure your Faculty Success Yearly Data (Administrative Data) and Workflow Template are set up to capture joint appointment reviews. The requirements for each are outlined in the following sections.

Faculty Success Configuration 

Joint faculty appointment information must be collected in owner data paths and within a dynamic-sub answer (DSA) field where data can be entered multiple times by selecting the "+ADD ROW" button within the DSA field. Typically appointment information is stored on the Yearly Data (Administrative Data) activity screen, with College and Department already configured for Joint Appointments. Common additional fields include Division, Discipline, and Faculty/Staff Rank.

For example, in the image below, the College, Department, Discipline, Faculty/Staff Rank and Tenure Status fields have been designated as owner data paths. However, only the first three fields are in the DSA field and can capture joint appointments, whereas the latter two, Faculty/Staff Rank and Tenure Status, are not in the DSA and will not be applicable for split Steps.

You can review the configuration for your Faculty Success instance by downloading the Configuration Report, which displays your current configuration for capturing faculty appointments. If any changes are required, a Faculty Success Administrator must submit a Screen Revision Work Request. Our technical team will provide recommendations on how to modify the data structure to a supported format for Joint Appointments.

While reviewing your configuration, it is important to ensure the appointments of faculty members who will be added to your schedule as candidates are up to date. To review and update candidate appointments, an Export Raw Data Report and CSV Data Import can be used. You may also export Users & Security to view all current appointment information for candidates (Note: College, Department, and other details in the Users & Security export are listed alphabetically).

Workflow Template 

When creating your workflow template, consider how you want to collect joint appointments, and keep the following points in mind for your reviewer steps where joint appointment reviewers are expected to be collected.

• Scope: must be set to a owner data path, such as College, Department, Discipline, Faculty/Staff Rank, or Tenure Status, and cannot be unrestricted. The joint appointment feature cannot be enabled with the scope Unrestricted.
• Type: "review committee" or "administrative review" must be selected. The review committee type allows both types of joint appointment features to be enabled, whereas the administrative reviewer type only allows the joint appointment type "Each appointment receives a separate step" to be enabled.
• When using the "Each appointment receives a separate step" joint appointment type, it's important to keep in mind that this joint appointment type cannot be used for external review steps. Additionally, branching options will not be applicable to this joint appointment type.

For a guide on how to configure your workflow template, see this article.

Enabling Joint Appointments

Once the prerequisites are verified, enable the joint appointments feature by checking the "Enable Joint Appointments" checkbox in your Workflow schedule's configuration tab. Once enabled, two appointment types will appear from which you can enable this feature "Add additional members to review committees" and Each appointment receives a separate step." These two appointment types are discussed further below.

Add additional members to review committees

This joint appointment type is best suited for when candidates are not evenly split between their appointments, such as being split 75/25 between two different appointments, but the primary appointment (first college and department) may require the input of the other appointments committee as additional committee members.

To begin to facilitate this joint appointment type follow the steps outlined below:

• Select the "Add additional members to review committees" as the joint appointment type.

• Navigate to the step where you wish to add the additional reviewers. In this step, you'll find the "Additional Members for Joint Appointments" field, specifically designed for adding extra reviewers. This field is visible only in steps with the type set to "Review Committee" in the workflow template and reviewers may be added by selecting their role group.

  If you can't see the role group for additional reviewers, it's likely in use for the step. Since a role group can't be used twice in the same step, generate a new one for additional reviewers, with the role group type set as "Administrative Reviewer." For guidance on creating this type of role group, refer to Creating a New Administrative Reviewer Role Group.

Once the additional reviewers are added, they become committee members to the review process automatically. When the candidate's submission advances to the review committee's step, these members can review the submission and edit fields designated exclusively for committee members.For more information on how to contribute to a submission as a committee member, visit this article.

Each appointment receives a separate step

When a candidates review process necessitates independent responses from all of their appointments committees or administrative reviewer, this method is recommended. Once the candidate's submission reaches any scoped (i.e., Department or College appointment) reviewer step, it will be split to gather independent input from each of the candidates appointments and will remain split until the step is completed by each of the candidates appointments and a consolidation step is reached, such as a Candidate Response type or Unrestricted scoped step. As such, if multiple steps of the same review scope (i.e., Department) occur sequentially, the steps may occur independently, and the process will not move to the "consolidation" step until all steps for the joint appointments are completed for each unit.

To begin to facilitate this joint appointment type follow the steps outlined below:

• Select the "Each appointment receives a separate step" as the joint appointment type.

• The workflow module will automatically distribute a candidate's submission among relevant appointments within the designated role groups for steps with reviewers. This enables reviewers for each appointment to independently submit their reviews when the submission reaches the reviewers' step.
  
  The distribution of the submission is determined by the role group assigned to the reviewers' step and the alignment of their appointments with the candidate's order of appointments. For instance, if a candidate has a primary appointment in "Art" and a secondary appointment in "Business," the submission will be divided between the appointed reviewers for "Art" and "Business" within the role group associated with the reviewer step. For detailed information on creating role groups, please refer to this article. 

When a candidates submission reaches the reviewer step, each appointment reviewer, whether Committee Chair, Committee Member, or Administrative Review, can initiate their review based on their role and appointment.  The "Step" column of the Workflow Inbox table will have the appointment in parentheses for which their review is being collected for and the appointment is consistently displayed as a header in the submission, ensuring both the candidate's name and the reviewer's appointment are always visible to the reviewer. 

For more information on how to contribute to a submission as part of the committee, visit this article. 

Monitoring Joint Appointment Submissions

The Submission Table allows for the monitoring of submissions. The Submission Table will display individuals with joint appointments in a different way than those with single appointments based on the type of joint appointment that was used, as detailed below:

• Add additional members to review committees: 
  For this joint appointment type, when a candidate has multiple appointments, the COLLEGE/SCHOOL and DEPARTMENT columns in the submission table will present these various appointments, as shown in the image below for candidates with multiple departmental appointments.
  
  
  
  
• Each appointment receives a separate step
  

  Under this joint appointment type, candidates with multiple appointments will find their various appointments listed in the COLLEGE/SCHOOL and DEPARTMENT columns. Additionally, the STEP column will indicate the step and the corresponding appointment in parentheses, with reviewer and deadline details displayed in the REVIEWER and DUE DATE columns, respectively.

When filtering and sorting joint appointments from the Submission Table, the candidate's primary appointment should be used to sort while all of their appointments can be used to filter. For example, if a candidate had two departments, Education as their primary and Art as their secondary, and you wanted to sort by Department, the primary appointment would be used to sort while both appointments could be used to filter.

Routing Joint Appointments

A submission can be routed by sending it back, recalling, auto-advancing, or utilizing branching options like early completion or fast-forward. However, for joint appointment types involving "Each appointment receives a separate step," branching options are not available. For both joint appointment types, sending back and recalling work normally. For instance, if a submission is sent back during a consolidation step, it returns to all reviewers from the preceding step. Auto-advance automatically moves the submission to the next step. Moreover, choosing early completion or canceling a submission means those actions cannot be undone and affect the entire submission.

Downloading Submissions with Joint Appointments 

The downloading methods for submissions with joint appointments remain the same as listed here, however, when downloading submission contents where joint appointment reviews occurred, keep the following points in mind for each joint appointment type.

• Add additional members to review committees: 
  Additional members' reviews will not be visible in the downloaded content as only the committee chair's review is part of the permanent submission and will be displayed in the downloaded submission contents.
  
  
• Each appointment receives a separate step
   For online viewing, the review material submitted by each appointment is displayed in the order of the candidate's primary appointment as the first response, followed by their secondary appointment as the second response, and so forth.
  
  If you are downloading the submission with files to your computer, the process remains unchanged. The zipfile will still include subfolders for each step that houses the file attachments added in each step.
  

Downloading Appointments and Reviewers 

After the schedule is launched, as a Workflow Administrator, you can retrieve an Excel file with candidate appointments. Simply click "Download Appointments and Reviewers" on the Configuration tab of the schedule. The file will include faculty appointments as well as reviewer details such as their Name, Role, and Role Group involvement. The file will be divided into two tabs, each of which will highlight different information, as detailed below.

Candidate Appointments 

This tab displays the schedule step status and appointments for each candidate, allowing for a quick review of each candidate's submission. Multiple appointments are displayed in separate columns, as shown in the image below by Department 1 and Department 2.

Candidate Reviewers by Step

This tab depicts how a candidate's submission is expected to progress, noting the reviewer at each step and providing an overview of the overall process status. Here is what each column contains:

• Column A: Candidate's full name in the "Last Name, First Name" format.
• Column B: Candidate's Faculty Success username.
• Column C: Step title (displayed multiple times for users with joint appointments).
• Column D: Scope of the step 
• Column E: Candidate's appointment responsible for reviewing the step.
• Column F: Full name of the reviewer.
• Column G: Role of the reviewer.
• Column H: Role group type the reviewer is involved in.
• Column I: Title of the role group the review is associated with.
• Column J: Step status of the submission. 
• Column K: Date of submission cancellation.
• Columns L, M, and N: Candidate submission identifiers.
• Column O: Indicates whether a submission has reached a step and the reviewer has started the review ("OPEN"), or if a step is pending ("NOT_STARTED"). For completed steps, "COMPLETED" will appear.