Executive Summary

Sharpschedule replaces an existing scheduling system at St. Vincent de Paul, Ozanam in Victoria BC. The initial tracking system provided information on community outings and activities and was designed to increase the frequency and quality of these outings. A change in need has now put focus on the in house activity as well as the outings. It was also desirable to create a more integrated solution, where client information, planned activities and actuals could be reconciled in the same place. Sharpschedule provides this unified recording system in the form of client, staff and schedule information capture screens, schedule administration (exception) screens and reports generated online or in pdf format.

Sharpschedule is designed with a phased approach. The first phase of the project will provide detailed scheduling information and reconcilliation, as well as reporting. Database tables will be provided for capture in a number of other areas, mostly centered around client goals and planning, but data entry and reporting for these sub-systems will be implemented in future revisions. The business needs that sharpschedule will satisfy today are:

  1. Staff Data Management: Tracking of staff contact information, and staff photos.

  2. Client Data Management: Tracking of client contact information, client photos, medical information, client goals and comments on client progress.

  3. Consolidation of existing scheduling tools: Replace current word and excel documents with a pdf schedule report that is generated from current "live" data.

  4. Auditability: Provide an electronic tracking system to account for changes made in the schedule, both before an activity would be completed and after/ during the activity has been completed in the form of an exception report. Exceptions would occur if a client was scheduled to perform an activity and was unable to perform the activity at that point in time (i.e. was sick).

  5. Increase Accessibility: Web interface allows client information to be easily accessible by all staff members.

  6. Security: Integrate with current Windows NT domain security, provides lockout of administrative only pages to non-administers.

Future functionality will include:

  1. Client Data Management: Tracking of client medical information, client goals and automation of client quarterly reports.

  2. Security: Role based security to allow view privialeges to certain data while locking down edit privileges.

Sharpschedule uses open technologies in an effort to reduce the cost of licensing to the Ozanam agency, with the exception of Windows XP Professional all components are freely available (please see Appendix A, Tools for details). Future goals will be to deploy the application using mono and Linux to push all components into the free/ open source realm.