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Happy National Sourdough Bread Day, HRD! If you are one of those people who took up sourdough bread-making during the pandemic, I encourage you to try my favorite grilled cheese recipe: Muenster and Avocado Grilled Cheese. (If, like me, you are not one of those people, you can use store-bought bread.) Enjoy! – Siobhain
Sign up for Introduction to Creating Accessible Word Documents on Thursday, April 14: If you create documents for internal or external use, this class is highly recommended. It covers the basics of creating an accessible Word document that meets MDH standards and is easy to use and edit by everyone. Plus, you learn about some advanced features of Word that are both impressive to others and make your life easier. You can sign up for the class in ELM (just search “accessibility”).
Coming soon from MNIT: Softphones, OneDrive, Laptop Replacements: MNIT has been working on several projects lately, and a few of them are almost complete!
- For staff who do not yet have a Teams Softphone, you should be seeing them in the next few weeks – the Agency Project Planning Team (APP) has created a guide for How to use the Teams softphone to help you get started.
- MNIT has replaced 49 laptops for staff in HRD who were very overdue for a new computer, and less than 15 people are left on the list! Right now, MNIT is waiting on responses from several staff to move forward, so please get back to them as soon as you are able.
- While you can use OneDrive through Teams and your web browser, there’s also a OneDrive app that has some really useful features we’ve been looking forward to (like the option to sync documents for offline use). MNIT says they are working on this rollout, and it should be available by May.
Congratulations to our newest HRD Site Manager, Theresa Gullingsrud! Theresa completed the HRD SharePoint Learning Path on LinkedIn Learning and is now able to help her teammate Jen Bahr with a project to rebuild the Federal Team’s training sites. If you’d like to learn more about SharePoint and get some shiny new powers for yourself, check in with Siobhain Rivera for more details.
HRD Org Chart is now available on our SharePoint page: In case you missed last week’s Teams announcement, you can now find the updated HRD Organizational Chart on our HRD SharePoint home page under the HRD Redesign heading. We’ve already got some updates planned for it, but as Maria said in our last meeting, it’s a work in progress. We’ll continue to update it over time as we move forward.
MDH buildings are set to reopen in less than a month, on April 22, and this means several changes for staff, including those who plan to continue teleworking. Susan Winkelmann will present at the HRD Redesign Conversation meeting on April 1 to give an overview and answer questions about what the next steps are for HRD.
You can find the full slide deck in the Files tab of our MDH_HRD Team if you would like to review it, but here are some of the highlights:
- Staff who will be teleworking 3+ days per week will need to sign up for a time to go into the office and remove personal items and any IT equipment that they need for teleworking between April 1 and April 22. Instructions were emailed out earlier this week, including a link to sign up for a day and time.
- Paper files and unused IT equipment can stay in workspaces for now; we will be doing a coordinated clean up effort later in this process.
- In Phase 2, we’ll be discussing what our needs are for our new hybrid spaces. If you have input or ideas, you can send them to Betsy Hammer, Michelle Adkins, and Susan Winkelmann.
Many of the common questions that staff have are answered on the Work-Life Transition SharePoint site, so if you have a question, take a moment to review the information there. If you still aren’t sure, reach out to your supervisor or use the Submit a Question page of the WLT site.
Happy Springtime, HRD! It has been a while since you last heard from me/read from me. For this edition of the Have you HRD – Data Edition, I wanted to talk about some common simple problems that I see with Microsoft Excel and how to fix them.
Data in a cell showing up as “####”: Sometimes in Excel, the data in a cell will read as a bunch of pound signs/hashtags. This occurs because the amount of space that the data take up is longer than the amount of space the data column allows. This is a SUPER easy fix. If you ever see this issue, simply make the column wider! To do that, just go to the column name (C, D, etc.), click and hold the vertical line to the right of the letter (circled in red below), and drag your mouse to the right until you get the desired column width.
 Numbers dropping 0s at the start if they start with 0s: As a default, Excel will drop 0s at the start of number fields. For example, if I type “00521” into a default-format Excel data field it will get converted to “521.” I commonly hear this complaint when it comes to HFIDs getting copy-pasted into Excel sheets. This is easy to avoid as long as you follow a couple of easy steps before pasting the data.
- Click the column name (C, D, etc.) to select the whole column.
- In the Number section of the Home ribbon, change the data type to “Text” by clicking the drop-down box in the “Number” section of the toolbar and selecting “Text.” Once that is done, you can paste your data and no 0s will be dropped!
 Numbers getting converted to dates: Sometimes, Excel will convert a number to a date when it isn’t supposed to be a date. For example, the number “2202” will convert to “10-Jan” if there was previously a date entered in that cell. To prevent this, change the number type (just like how you did above) to “Text” and then re-enter/paste the data. That way, Excel will no longer view the data you’re entering as a date and the number will be left as a number just like it is supposed to be.
So overall, Excel can do some funky stuff or be super weird at times. Hopefully the above points helped you to get over some of the weirdness that Excel can bring about. As always, feel free to contact me with questions or comments.
Contact Info: erik.holmberg@state.mn.us
Deputy Commissioner Kelly recently announced that our colleagues at the Human Resources Management team have a new director, and we’ve got more positions on the way. Please continue to share these with anyone you think would be a good fit!
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Engineer Senior or Graduate 2 (Assisted Living Evaluator), Job ID: 53603: This posting will be used to fill five (5) positions within the Engineering Services department of the Health Regulation Division. The positions are being posted at both the Engineer Graduate 2 and Engineer Senior levels in the Assisted Living team. As part of the team, the incumbent will enforce State physical environment license requirements in healthcare facilities. The incumbent will provide construction document reviews, inspections and surveys for the evaluation of assisted living facilities to ensure the physical environment complies with State laws and rules. This position will also provide training and expertise to assisted living professionals to educate them to ensure facility compliance.Closes April 4, 2022.
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Health Program Manager (State Operations), Job ID: 52608: This position exists to direct statewide licensing, registration, and federal certification health program management for all State and federal agencies within the Health Regulation Division. The incumbent will assist the Executive Regional Operations Manager in directing and supervising major multi-faced health programs through the direction of supervisors for the improvement of care and operational and administrative practices in State and federal health care facilities. Closes April 20, 2022.
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Nursing Evaluator (Federal Operations), Job ID: 53255: These positions will provide onsite surveillance and guidance to health care providers in an effort to assure a level of quality care based upon compliance with Federal and State laws and rules which directly relate to the provision of nursing and health services. Closes August 1, 2022.
These positions are open to both internal and external candidates. If you would like to apply, please follow the steps below:
- Sign into Employee Self Service
- On My Homepage, click on Careers and enter the Job Opening ID in the Search Jobs box and click >> (Search).
- Click on the Job Title to view the job posting.
- Click Apply For This Job in the top right hand corner.
Dear HRD –
First of all, I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to each of you for your diligence and perseverance as we did the hard work together of learning a new system and entering time in Jira and Paradise. Your consistency and accuracy were vital to the validation and confirmation analyses performed by the project team. I also want to thank the supervisors who took the time to review the timesheets, verified for accuracy, and coached your team members to ensure full participation. This project involves all of us and I want to thank you for your hard work.
I also am very pleased to inform you HRD will stop entering time into Paradise at the end of the current pay period (Tuesday, March 29, 2022). Beginning March 30, we will only use Jira to track our time. I am excited for the reporting and analysis opportunities Jira offers.
What happens next:
- Jira timesheets are due at the end of the pay period. This is the same schedule as today.
- Paradise will continue to be used for project code creation. These codes are loaded daily into Jira.
- SSIS will be the source of complaint and maltreatment code creation. This transition is planned for late April. More information will be shared later.
- For staff who schedule evaluators, the functionality in Paradise which verifies timesheets are posted will be disabled. Jira does not have a similar function. Instead, it is the responsibility of supervisors to ensure their staff are submitting timesheets on time. Supervisors should communicate with their manager if staff are late with their timesheets and determine next steps.
- If you are a Paradise reporter, make sure all of your timesheets from the start of the fiscal year through March 29, 2022 are submitted to Paradise. We need a complete set of time reporting dating in Paradise for proper invoicing.
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Melissa Zaitz and Mary Halet are available to help troubleshoot and answer Jira questions.
Again, thank you all very much for your involvement and support of this project.
Sincerely,
Hardi Wangsabesari
PS - here's the actual grilled cheese recipe. Happy April Fool's!
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