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Work Packages
A Work Package is a collection of activity that is limited in scope to certain staff, programmes, modules, and times. It is normally used to define the work of a School or Department for an Academic Year.
Members of staff can select a Work Package to see, and interact with. They cannot select Work Packages of which they are not themselves a member. WAM is designed to promote transparency, but only within peer groups with reasonable equivalent expectations.
You can create work packages from the Admin Interface. Give it a clear, unambiguous name, for instance:
Engineering 2017/2018
and you can add more details in the provided box. You must define the start and end date for the package in ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD). It is recommended that you don't have work packages with overlapping dates for the same staff.
There are three flags you can set for packages.
Packages with Draft status will make it clear that allocations are being worked upon and may not be final, whatever final really means anyway in most academic departments.
Packages with Archive status are considered closed for further updates and business, and may not be selectable by staff in several places.
Packages with Hidden status cannot be selected by members of staff unless they are both in the package (see above) and they have the permission to create Work Packages. This allows very experimental packages to be worked with while not causing panic or concern, or to allow scenarios to be tested.
You will need to select at least one group of staff that will be handled by this package. It's normal to have a Group of staff, like Engineering Academic Staff that will be used across several packages.
WAM will also then require roughly what 100% load looks like in terms of hours, how many days a week your staff work for a full FTE staff member and the number of working days. While it is understood that Academic staff often have flexibility, these norms are used for certain calculations, particularly if you are using the Projects feature.
A common use case is that in a new Academic Year you will wish to take a previous Work Package and clone it as a starting point. WAM provides functionality for you to decide what parts you want to roll into a new (empty) Work Package.