News You Can use

The following is a copy of information provided on the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The link to this site follows:

http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/ctt/col0400.html

Corrections Telecommunication and TechnologyF. Warren Benton, Ph.D.John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNYReprints from a series published in Corrections Managers' Report.Access the entire collection at the CTT Web Site.
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Internet Tools for Managing Time

Correctional staff and offenders both have strong reasons to be concerned about managing and using time for prisoners because they have too much of it, and for staff because they have too little. This column will focus on Internet and computer resources available to improve how correctional professionals can manage the use of time.

Shift Schedule Management

A core problem for correctional facility managers involves the administration of the work schedule, a process called "roster management." A supervisor must comply with wage and hour laws and labor agreements, track time worked and leave taken, while assuring that workers are efficiently deployed and receive scheduled days off and vacations. All this has to be accomplished while trying to minimize the use of overtime and involuntary double-shifts, and while trying to stay within budget constraints.

Good places to start on the Internet are provided by GoCrawl at http://gocrawl.com/ or HotBot at http://www.hotbot.com/, or Yahoo and http://www.yahoo.com/, if you search on the terms "Personnel and Scheduling." These sites maintain and update a listing of web sites related to roster management. Some of the sites offer free services and software, including the following:

Schedule-Me offers an online calculator for a work schedule. You tell the calculator how many employees you need on each of the 7 days of the week, and it will work out an optimized solution for how many employees can have Saturday and Sunday off, how many can have Sunday and Monday off, and so on. Winmetrics offers a free web-based scheduling service. The hitch is that, if you want more advanced services, you have to pay. However, for a small organization, their free service is worth considering.

Another good general resource is provided by Winfiles. This site is a collection of free and shareware software packages relating to scheduling and calendar management.

Leading commercial programs in this area include "Relief Factor Management," offered by Hatrak Associates at Hatrak Associates. They offer software packages that support the process of designing and administering a work schedule. A competing product is offered by ScheduleSoft, and another competing product is offered by Positive Solutions Incorporated.

Calendars

For many correctional professionals, the challenge of time management is not the work schedule itself, but rather the management of appointments and meetings within the work schedule. Most computers arrive with software packages that include some time management applications. However, for these applications to function in coordination with other colleagues requires a networked application. On the web, a new category of calendaring service has emerged, provided free personal calendaring with the ability to develop and display a group calendar, and the ability to access the calendar from any web browser. Some examples of these free services include:

JointPlanning Netscape Calendar MyEvents PlanetAll When.com

Obviously, for correctional facility managers and planners, JointPlanner would offer the unique advantage of endless puns and word play associated with the name. There are many similar web sites, and a good way to find them is to search on the term "Personal Web-Based Calendars" in Yahoo.

Group Project Applications

For a small group that collaborates on projects, a new category of web services is emerging the virtual office suite. These are web-based services that include standard applications for word processing, database management, and other standard functions, as well as group collaboration packages such as calendars. Several of these products can be evaluated on the web.

WebOS offers the HyperOffice. This product is free, and it includes free file storage space on their site. It permits a team of workers to share drafts of documents, conduct simultaneous and threaded discussions, and jointly schedule their time, meetings, and activities.

A similar product is MyFreeDesk. This product is similar to HyperOffice, but the calendaring application does not seem to be as developed.

NuoMedia offers a similar application suite, with an emphasis on compatibility with handheld personal computer devices such as a PalmPilot. Once again, the service itself is free.

ThinkFree provides a similar service. Their application includes programs that you download to your computer so that you can work offline and then connect when necessary.

These are applications that might be useful for short-term projects when a group of workers are collaborating on a project from separate locations. For example, a team of Deputy Wardens from several prisons might be drafting a revised procedure, or a team of correctional officers might be jointly evaluating a security product.

Coming Soon: Open Calendaring Standards for the Web

Internet planning and policy organizations are working a uniform standards for calendaring applications, with the following general goals. Applications should: inter-operate and schedule with other open standards-based C&S systems allow users to choose a calendaring program regardless of their calendaring server software integrate desktop applications with each other and with handheld or portable devices.

A good source about the evolving standards is a paper titled Overview Of Calendaring And Scheduling Standards. Another more technical article is "How Calendaring and Scheduling Are Joining the Web Revolution. In both cases, the articles discuss how web site and network designers can plan calendaring applications so that calendars can be shared across organizations, and between people using different brands of software.

In most bureaucracies, the principle applies that "work expands to fill the time available." In correctional facilities and programs, work seems to expand regardless of the time available. Fortunately, there are some resources on the Internet that can help correctional managers to make the best use of available time.