Development Roadmap - Release 38

Release 38 is planned for deployment into the ESR solution on Friday 30th March 2018 (subject to successful deployment).

The improvements planned in this release include:

• Enhancements to the search results page for Learning Administrators
  • Improving the navigation and information returned when using search 
• The ability to add national learning objects to local offerings
  • Helping offer more flexibility using e-Learning alongside classroom learning
• Assignment change reasons to be made available in manager self service
  • Allowing Managers to capture more detail as to why changes are being made
• New IAT notification for Junior Doctor & Trainee Dentist
  • Annual Leave appointment and Cash Floor Protection details will be available to send from a previous employer to a role holder in the new employing organisation
•  Updates to pension over-ride end date to be included in the pensions interface
•  Remove the ability to delete disability records in ESS
  • Employees will no longer have the option to delete a record but will be able to amend the status to reflect the correct details, improving data integrity for equal opportunity monitoring
•  Update list of values for professional membership registration
  • Ensuring the latest set of registration details are available to record in ESR
•  Notification to employees when contractual changes are made to their record 
• To help organisations move towards paperless transactions, Employees will receive a notification advising them of a change in conditions of service when any of the following items are amended either in SSHR or professional users:
  • Position Title
  • Grade
  • Salary (pro rata)
  • Contracted Hours

Continued Portal Development

We are continuing to improve the usability and features available directly from the ESR Portal, and as part of Release 38 two additional features will be included: 

• Building on the capability that allows targeting of ESR Portal Announcements to holders of specific URPs, we will be adding capability to target specific Staff Group and/or Job Roles. For example, should you wish to target all Nursing Staff with a particular announcement this will be possible following Release 38.
• A new portlet will be introduced to the Payroll Dashboard for holders of the Payroll Super Administration and Payroll Administration URPs. The portlet is designed to give Payroll teams a quick overview of key processes and highlight if any further action may be required should a process fail or is yet to complete, with the option to display more details on associated sub processes and also navigate directly to the Concurrent Manager forms within ESR.

The set of processes included in the portlet are:

• NHS Payroll Run (All frequencies and supplementary)
• NHS Prepayments (All frequencies and supplementary)
• NHS RTI Prepayments & FPS Process (All frequencies and supplementary)
• NHS Retro Pay (All frequencies and supplementary)
• NHS RTI FPS XML Process
• NHS RTI FPS XML Process (All frequencies and supplementary)

Business Intelligence

Release 38 also includes the latest wave of BI changes to support the Reporting Strategy to make additional data items and subject areas available. These include areas to support the replication of standard Discoverer reports, alongside additional functions such as Payroll Balances, Data Quality Trending and BI Usage Tracking, further underpinning the overall strategy to decommission Discoverer later this year.  More details are available in the BI article in this edition of ESR News.  We will be scheduling webinar sessions in April 2018 to recap and outline the next phases of the Reporting Strategy.

Roadmap for 2018/2019

Whilst Release 38 will bring us to the end of the “original” roadmap, our development plans will not be slowing down and we are beginning to schedule work for the rest of 2018. These will be a combination of user driven requests through the NSIG process and also through strategic initiatives to develop ESR. We will share more information in the next month or so, but our plans include:

• Improvements to the recording of Apprentices;
• New IAT Role for Service History;
• Addition of HCPC to the Professional Bodies interface;
• Employee initiated termination from employee self-service;
• Automation of internet access to ESR for employees;
• Use of standard reference for internal applicants.

Withdrawal of mhapp route into ESR

During the latter part of 2017, the ESR Programme Team initiated a project to consider when the ESR service would logically move on to the new Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) that NHS Digital is introducing to replace N3.

As part of the HSCN planning work, we identified that it would be beneficial to complete the hardware and network changes prior to withdrawing the Mhapp access route to ESR. This therefore introduces an extended lead time for Organisations to prepare for the change.

At this stage we are working to a timescale of having completed the migration to HSCN at the end of June 2018, and intend to advise all NHS Organisations in June or July 2018, of the exact date that Mhapp access will be withdrawn. However, at this stage it’s important that Organisations are assured that we will give 2 months’ notice - meaning it will be no earlier than 1^st August, but no later than 30^th September 2018. 

In addition, we are working hard to resolve some residual issues that are resulting in a diminished Portal user experience for some, and our efforts will continue during this period.  In parallel, it’s important that all Organisations continue their work to resolve any local dependencies (including IT set-up and user support/guidance) by the end of June 2018.   The NHS ESR Account Managers and/or Functional Advisors will continue to maintain contact with ESR Leads to ensure that Organisations are able to address any local I.T dependencies by the end of June, and provide the appropriate guidance where necessary.