This is a follow-up on the 6/2 article "Understanding Kronos Environments."
There are different strategies to creating and maintaining the environments we've been discussing (SAND, DEV, TEST, PROD) and in determining just how many there should be. Most companies have constraints in budget and resources and the strategy that is best for you is going to be a function of those constraints. I believe that the concepts for these environments still apply, no matter what your strategy is and what constraints you work around. For now I'll leave it to you to determine just how many. Let's look at some other environments that can be very useful.
How about a TRAINing environment?
How about a MODELing environment? This is a copy of PROD with all sign-offs removed for a period. One ‘models’ change pay configuration elements such as rounding. This allows one to see what employee time records would have looked like had you had a different pay policy in place. As you might imagine it can be very useful for HR to determine if a change like switching from rounding to minute-to-minute pay will result in cost savings or additional costs.
What about QA? I've seen setups where there are multiple QA environments to segregate the work that valuable department performs.
I'd love to hear about your experiences and other environment ideas. Please comment.
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