The University Human Resources department plans to review everyone's position data questionnaire (PDQ) every five years and our turn has come. Our final copies are due to IPS September 30. Here's the schedule we are going to follow.

SCHEDULE

Date	Action
Friday, August 26	Staff will email your list of suggested changes to your PDQ to Bob.
Friday, September 9	Management team will make changes and return Draft 1 to staff.
Friday, September 16	Staff will review Draft 1 and send list of suggested changes to Bob.
Tuesday, September 27	Final Draft copies returned to staff.
Friday, September 30	Final Draft copies will be sent to IPS.

COMMENTS

You've been through the PDQ training conducted by Mike Herbstritt so you've heard this before but here are a few points that need repeating.

The PDQ and its evaluation by Human Resources determines the pay grade for your job - so it can affect your salary for this year and years to come. In other words, this is an important exercise.

Human Resources is doing so many PDQs at once that they are not going to be able to meet with everyone individually. Instead, they will rely solely on what is written in your PDQ.

We are going to send several copies back and forth so please be careful to label each draft and each list of suggested changes. We want to make sure the final version is actually the final version.

Our current PDQs are in pretty good shape. We will start with what we have and go from there.

Instead of sending me your entire PDQ, please send me a list of the changes or additions you suggest, and to make my life easier, please do it on the enclosed form.

PDQ draft changes.DOC

PDQ GUIDELINES
Here are some suggestions for preparing your list of changes. First, you will need look at your current PDQ (in this database )
A. Position Summary - I think most of our existing summaries are pretty good. Some of them are a little long; so see if you can shorten yours.

B. Measures of Impact - Here's what we've determined the headings mean. Program = grant or contract; Department = MTAS team, like codes; Division = MTAS; and Campus = IPS. Almost everyone at MTAS has significant impact external to the University. It's important to describe each box that is checked. Our current PDQs often leave this blank so we need to fix this.

budget impact - Most consultants will be able to add a check in the effective recommendations to commit funds box and then will need to give an explanation below.

C. Position duties - We have a good list of duties for each position currently. Here, it's important, as someone told me last week, to include every part of your job in "painful detail." Please tell me what to add, change, or delete.

D. Decisions - We are using some 15 year old boilerplate language for much of this. Please improve it.

E. Supervision - Include the people you supervise, but also, for consultants, if you make recommendations to cities on hiring decisions, please include that. Again, a detailed explanation is necessary.

F. Minimum Qualifications - We looked at these pretty closely when we revised our salary plan several years ago. Please make any changes you recommend.

G. Additional Information - Again, we are using 15 year old boilerplate. I'll buy lunch for anyone who can come up with better boilerplate. And, seriously, everyone should add any additional information to our boilerplate as it directly affects your job.

FINALLY

Please remember our deadlines. Doing one PDQ is hard; doing all 45 of them at once is going to require cooperation.

One difficulty we may have is that what makes sense to us may make no sense to the Human Resources committee that will review the PDQ. Sometimes we speak in an MTAS language. I've asked Becky and Izetta to help me by reviewing all the first drafts to highlight any area that we think the committee might not understand.

The management team and I will work together to approve the final version before it goes to IPS and then on to Human Resources.

Thanks.