Your ESR News

The Pace Of Change

In the December edition of ESR News, we summarised the scale of the journey that ESR had been on throughout the year.  On reflection, 2017 was a major milestone in the overall progression and development of the ESR solution. Since full roll-out completed in 2008, 2017 was the single most important year in ESRs development, from the perspective of pace and scale of change. 

The process of defining the Development Roadmap began in early 2016; later that year, we were able to deliver the first areas of improved functionality for our users.  The on-line payslip capability and access to Employee Self Service from the internet were two key milestones in the Roadmap.

The real transformation work then gathered momentum during 2017, with developments including:

• Delivery of a ‘front end’ Portal for all users of ESR:
  • In February 70% of users accessed ESR via the Portal – my.esr.nhs.uk (with only 18% using the Mhapp route and 12% having used both during the month).
  • Over 399,000 NHS employees have now opted-out of receiving paper payslips by using the simple opt-out capability via the Portal employee dashboard (directly removing administrative costs associated with printing and local distribution).
• Delivery of user interface developments for Self Service – both manager and employee – including the rendering of the Portal and Self Service for mobile devices;
• Expanding the internet access to managers using self-service, through a two factor authenticated solution. This was extended further with the ability for professional users to access Business Intelligence dashboards on the internet and mobile devices;
• Inclusion of alerting and benchmarking capabilities within the Business Intelligence solution;
• Delivery of further portlets – including the ability to update class attendances directly through a portlet (including access on mobile devices).

The last major milestone in the Development Roadmap for 2017 was the delivery of the Oracle 12.2 upgrade in December – by far the largest technical development and release that the ESR Programme has undertaken to date.  This upgrade has placed the ESR solution on the latest version of Oracle software - from both a support and development perspective. The release in December also included significant process improvements in OLM for Learning Administrators.

During the course of 2017 the ESR Programme has delivered ground-breaking technology to your ESR solution; technology that for some users was long awaited. Whilst significant sections of our user base tell us that these functional changes have been a game changer, this level of complex development and pace of change can introduce particular challenges. Indeed, we acknowledge that in early January, immediately following Release 37, there were issues with solution performance/response times for some organisations and in certain areas – this being a valid cause of concern amongst users. As a Programme, we pride ourselves on the change success rate; and whilst Release 37 is very much considered a success, we apologise for any inconvenience that these isolated issues may have caused.

As we look forward, the ESR Programme Team will continue to prioritise and address any issues that are identified. However, issue identification and resolution is optimised in partnership with you as users, helping us to identify such issues early and raising detailed Service Requests (SRs). To this end, and by way of further support, we have published a ‘hints and tips’ guide to raising SRs to assist in better understand how to prioritise SRs – you’ll find it in this edition of ESR News.

ESRs next major release, in March 2018, will see the final development from the 2017/18 Roadmap. This will signal the end of the ‘Enhance Project’ of user requirements. However, the ESR Programme will not be stopping there. During 2018, we will continue to work with users to identify functional improvements for possible release to the solution. 

In this edition of ESR News there is an article detailing the proposed improvements in Release 38, but in summary they include:

• Release of the final developments of the Reporting Roadmap – which will then lead to the decommissioning of the Discoverer tool during Q3/Q4 of 2018 (you can read more about the BI changes in this edition of ESR News);
• Delivery of a new functional solution to replace EDI to all organisations – currently concluding a successful pilot phase;
• Continued development and improvement of the Portal, as we move towards the removal of the legacy access route to ESR (mhapp). Within the Roadmap article in this edition of ESR News you will find information outlining the current position and indicative dates for the removal of mhapp.

We are also planning for work beyond March, with provisional plans including:

• The delivery of interface capability to the GDC and HCPC;
• Working with the key national forums to look at how we can develop ESR to further support Streamlining;
• Improved capability for the recording of apprentices – based on requirements developed with HEE.

During the last 18-months, together, we have redefined ESR; we have increased the number of NHS employees who interact with ESR and we have reinforced ESRs’ place at the heart of workforce management for the NHS. As a Programme Team we will continue to work with our User Forums to ensure ESR continues to meet the needs of the NHS, and as user organisations, there are established mechanisms by which you can support these objectives, including: 

• Use your regional ESR Special Interest Groups (SIG), encourage your employees to put ideas and suggestions forward for functional change;
• Ensure that all of your end users are aware of key ESR information (e.g. planned downtime and improvements to functionality). The portal capability has a broadcast message capability that will be useful and there is also an ESR App that can be downloaded, providing system information and national push notifications. Visit your App store (Apple or Android) and search for MyESR.  Your users can also follow us on Twitter - @nhsesr – where we tweet the dates and times for planned downtime;
• Raise SRs when things don’t work as you would expect, at an appropriate priority level.

Delivered in partnership with our supplier (IBM), the ESR Programme is uniquely placed to provide an NHS system and service that is led by the NHS for the NHS. By working together to better understand development and service opportunities, identify and resolve issues and share best practice use of ESR, collectively we can ensure the NHS maximises its use of the NHS Asset that is ‘Your ESR’.

Strategic Collaboration of NHS Workforce Services

With effect from 1 April 2018, the NHS ESR Programme, together with NHS Jobs, will be joining the new NHS Workforce Services directorate of the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA). NHSBSA is a Strategic Health Authority and Arm’s-Length Body of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). It already administers the NHS Pensions Scheme and a HR Shared Service function to ALBs.

Whilst the ESR Programme will continue to operate as-is, by bringing together NHS Jobs, ESR, HR Shared Services and NHS Pensions, the NHSBSA is uniquely placed as an ALB to facilitate shared learning and innovation across the services, whilst retaining the individual identities of each.

In a joint statement, Gordon Coyne, NHSBSA Director of NHS Workforce Services and Paul Spooner, NHS ESR Programme Director said:

‘We’re pleased to see such complementary NHS workforce programmes coming together under a single governance model. The individual programmes of NHS Jobs, ESR, NHS Pensions and NHSBSA HR Shared Services have always maintained a very close and positive relationship, which is reflected by the integration that is in place today. We’re looking forward to optimising the benefits of working more closely together, which will help us achieve our principal goal of providing both excellent and value-add workforce services to the NHS.’

 

 

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. 

Service Desk - Hints & Tips

Back in July 2017 we launched the new ESR Service Desk.  With over 2,000 authorised contacts interacting with the ESR Service Desk, and on average 2,000 calls a month received by the Service Desk Team, as a Programme Team we need to ensure that the Service Desk is an efficient and effective tool for our Users.

As with any change, it has taken some time to ‘bed in’ and whilst the Service Desk User Guide is easily accessible via ESR Infopoint, sometimes Users may want a quick reference guide to refer to.

To assist ESR Service Desk Users with raising SRs the IBM CRM Team has developed a shortened simplified version of the User Guide, concentrating on those activities that are necessary to ensure our Users are getting the best from the system and that calls are being raised at the correct priority to ensure they receive the appropriate level of response based on their criticality.

The Hints and Tips guide is available on ESR Infopoint via this link: https://www.infopoint.esr.nhs.uk/?q=node/5142 and a copy will be distributed to each Authorised Contact.

If you have any queries relating to this document please contact your Client Relationship Manager.

2017: A Year of BI Development

2017 was an extremely busy year in the ongoing development of ESR BI. It included the implementation of a large number of enhancements as part of the Reporting Strategy/Roadmap, with a focus on enabling organisations to extend the list of reports now being regularly executed in ESR BI.

Key developments during the year included:

• Embedding of BI data into the ESR Portal;
• Enabling access to BI reporting capability, for both managers and professional users, on mobile devices and via the internet through a controlled, two factor authentication process;
• Development of alerting and benchmarking capabilities.

The NHS ESR BI Team continues to develop and enhance the range of standard BI dashboards (over 160 change requests were raised and implemented in 2017) in order to provide the reports that organisations have requested and require to support their business processes. Alongside the enhancement work we have also been working towards creating BI equivalent reports to those currently provided in Discoverer; this is a key objective within our Reporting strategy as we plan the decommission of the Discoverer tool later in 2018. There are now 198 standard Discoverer reports that have equivalent reports in ESR BI in key areas such as Absence Management, Datetrack Changes/Change Events and Education/Learning.

To support the decommissioning of Discoverer we intend to adopt a phased approach to removing certain Discoverer workbooks, by the summer of 2018, where equivalent BI dashboards now exist. We will, of course, provide further information on this approach but we encourage organisations to begin investigating and embedding these BI dashboards into their business processes at the earliest opportunity.

East Kent University Hospitals NHS Trust has already begun to plan their move to ESR BI in readiness for the withdrawal of Discoverer.  Jan Jerram, the HR Systems Manager explains:

“We started this move by documenting all of our regular reports and mapping them to the corresponding BI reports. We then held an all-day session, away from the office, where we ran a few of our regular reports using both DISCO and BI and compared the results.  This allowed us to discuss the outputs and increase our confidence in BI. This has become an on-going process.  It has been a difficult change to achieve, and we still have work to do, but we are slowly moving the production of our reports to BI.  Because ESR BI is much more user friendly and intuitive compared to DISCO, it offers us the opportunity to improve our service, e.g. by increasing the number of staff who can run their own reports directly from BI, rather than waiting for our central team to produce them, our staff have up-to-date information whenever they need it”.

Enhanced Reporting Areas

Absence Timeline

These are highly utilised reports in Discoverer that provide the monthly and quarterly absence rates and estimated absence cost - updated weekly at each weekend.  These reports are also part of the ESR BI catalogue and are provided by the absence dashboard – the key difference being that the data is updated overnight in line with the rest of the data in ESR BI.

Additionally, in ESR BI these figures can be analysed by organisation, staff group and a number of different grouping attributes. Benchmarking is also available for the absence rate to allow managers to compare their absence rate with that of the organisation as a whole.

Change Event Log

ESR Release 33 enabled the enhanced change event log in ESR BI which captures 1,000 change events to support organisations in extending audit capability of their important data. In addition, further reports have been produced to allow organisations to measure the number of changes being done via ESR Self Service, therefore directly measuring benefit from the introduction of this service (see example chat below).

View event auditing was also made available in ESR Release 34 enabling organisations to audit the viewing of employee data by central teams and managers.

Education and Learning

This large area of reporting has been significantly enhanced in ESR BI when compared to the Discoverer reports, with the inclusion of Certification subscription reporting. A comprehensive subject area in ESR BI has been designed to ensure users have all of the data items and logic required to produce accurate and meaningful intelligence for local teams. The standard dashboards build on the well-used Discoverer reports as a base, but are significantly enhanced beyond what we were historically able to achieve with Discoverer with items such as ‘Class Planning’ and the ability to report on all courses, classes and enrolments regardless of person type or source of booking.

 

Compliance

Compliance reporting has always been a well utilised area in Discoverer – in ESR BI we have developed this area further so that it now includes:

• The ability to report on External Learners’ compliance
• Predicted Compliance analyses
• The ability to report on competency requirements set as Supplementary Role and Assignment level
• More flexible ways of grouping and selecting data and competencies to fit local requirements.
• Ability to look at trends of compliance over a period of time

Payroll

The popular Element Schedule report from Discoverer has been replicated in ESR BI. In addition, to support Payroll teams, further reports for Pay History and Pay Analysis have been made available. These enable payroll users to look at the gross and net pay values for employees to quickly resolve any payroll queries.

These reports also support organisations in spotting potential issues with pay values over different periods.

Starters/Leavers

BI includes a range of reports for starters and leavers, including cumulative headcount and Turnover rates (monthly and 12 month rolling). In addition, ESR Release 37 gave users the ability to ‘benchmark’ their key measures against their region and against the NHS national figures in ESR BI.

A number of grouping attributes are provided to enable users to find key areas of the organisation that may need attention. BI also contains reports to show staff movements not considered as part of Discoverer – for example staff who move from Bank to Substantive posts.

ESR User Access

The Workforce Profile dashboard contains an ‘Online ESR Access’ tab which lists all staff along with details of whether they have an ESR user account, an internet ESR account and whether they have registered to ‘Upgrade Access’ in the ESR portal if they have other access to ESR. This is particularly useful to understand the access your employees have to ESR following rollout.

Next Steps

As we move closer to the decommission of the Discoverer tool, the next three to four months will involve further ESR BI developments (these will be in addition to our normal development process). These developments will include:

• Payroll Balances
• Travel and Subsistence
• Reporting on Future Changes
• BI Report Usage Tracking
• Data Quality
• Vehicle Repository

Discoverer will be withdrawn from ESR during 2018 so for NHS organisations, it is imperative that they begin to reduce their reliance on Discoverer reports.  The suite of ESR BI reports offer a superior reporting solution to users, and as we have outlined above, the range of reports will continue to grow over the coming months.

There is a Reporting section on our website where you can find out more about ESR BI, including helpful documents and a new report writer's guide that you can download. 

If you need guidance about how to get started with ESR BI or have specific questions about the functionality, or need support to prepare for the withdrawal of Discoverer please contact your NHS ESR Functional Advisor.

The Paper Payslip is changing

As part of an internal change within IBM, new technology is being introduced to generate the paper outputs from ESR.  This means that with effect from May 2018, the ESR Paper Pay Advice will be changing.

The paper Pay Advice stationery will change to align with the format of the on-line pay advice available via ESR, resulting in the new Pay Advice being a direct replica of the on-line payslip.

• The proposed paper Pay Advice will be slightly larger in size (when folded and sealed), although will still fit within a window envelope.
• The pay advice will open in a different way to the current pay advice, having a ‘zip’ to tear off towards the top.

Although this is a small change, the way the new paper Pay Advice will open has the potential to generate employee queries; as such, IBM has contacted all Payroll Leads (and ESR Leads) to advise them of the proposed change and has confirmed that a further communication will be issued at the end of March 2018 to confirm the exact date of change, and which pay run will be the first with the new paper Pay Advice.

We are preparing internal communication tools that Organisations can use to help employees understand how to open the Pay Advice.  

Remember - you can opt out of receiving a paper Pay Advice.  You can access your on-line Pay Advice within ESR Self Service via www.my.esr.nhs.uk  and from 2nd April you can opt out of the paper Pay Advice via the updated Portlet .

 

 

 

ESR and the new General Data Protection Regulation

For some months, the NHS and IBM ESR team has been assessing the impact of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation that will apply from 25^th May 2018.

The new regulation places additional or enhanced requirements on Controllers (NHS User Organisations) and the Processors that support and provide the ESR system.

The ESR GDPR Project Team is working towards the ESR service being provided in line with the regulation by the time it comes into effect.

Changes to the ESR service to support User Organisations in delivering their GDPR obligations.

We have received a number of requests from Employing Organisations asking for confirmation that ESR will be GDPR compliant by the 25^th May. Further to the GDPR impact assessment undertaken, we are progressing a number of specific requirements to meet the new regulations, so as to support User Organisations to be GDPR compliant when using ESR:

Subject Access Request

The ESR team is developing a new report that will provide details of all the personal data ESR holds on an individual. This will help User Organisations to respond when individuals request a copy of their personal data.

The list of Personal Data items held by ESR and therefore candidates for inclusion on the report is still under review, but it is already clear the number of items is extensive. Once the list is agreed, it will be shared with User Organisations.

As the report could contain sensitive data from across all the ESR functional areas including HR, Payroll, Learning and Occupational Health, the intention is to make the report available on a new User Responsibility Profile (URP). This will ensure the ability to run the report can be limited to selected individuals at the User Organisation that have the necessary training and clearance to be able to view the data the report contains.

Some fields, such as contacts, appraisals and referees, may contain personal data items for another person. It is therefore expected the Responsible Officer at the User Organisation will need to validate the content and where necessary redact certain items before issuing it to the individual.

The details of the structure and format of the report are still being considered, but the current plan is to make it available in Excel or PDF format to meet the GDPR requirement for the report to be “in a commonly used electronic form”.

Data Portability Request

In addition to the Subject Access Report, a further report is being developed to extract the personal information items that the individual themselves would have originally supplied to the User Organisation.

This will be a subset of the data items to be provided in the Subject Access Report. The final list of items to be included in this report is still under review, but once agreed will be shared with User Organisations. The new Data Portability Report will be made available via the new URP.

To comply with GDPR, the data from the report is currently planned to be made available in a file that is in the industry standard “.csv” format – (Comma Separated Variable).

Fair Processing Notices

The regulation requires Controllers to provide individuals with both the purpose for which data is held / being processed as well as details of other recipients with whom that personal data is shared. As users of the ESR System, NHS User Organisations will be required to comply with this article of the regulation and provide individuals with this information before it is entered onto ESR.  From 2018 and on an annual basis thereafter, the NHS ESR team will write to all User Organisations to reiterate the additional fair processing obligations placed upon them by GDPR.

To support User Organisations in meeting those obligations and in communicating with their ESR users, the ESR Terms and Conditions available via the url https://my.esr.nhs.uk link from the ESR logon page will be updated to add clarity on the systems ESR integrates with and why, e.g. HM Revenue and Customs - for the purpose of sharing deductions from Payroll for Income Tax and National Insurance and Tax Code updates.

If you have any questions about anything you have read in this article please contact the NHS ESR Central Team via esr.communications@nhs.net