Category:Interviewer Tab (Activity Manager)



Interviewer Tab (Activity Manager)

The Activity Manager was created to ensure that a supervisor could manage all aspects of handling hundreds of Interviewers/Employees simultaneously from one simple interface. The Activity Manager is unique in that it gives a supervisor the power to immediately move employees between assignments, control their efficiency, manage their time registration, and track their start and end times. The Activity Manager makes it possible to work with Interviewers who may be sitting anywhere in the world with greater efficiency than if you were sitting with them on a basic CATI system in the same office.

A typical work day of a supervisor is to open the Activity Manager and check what Shifts he has available for the different assignments. He will then make sure that they are all registered for the correct assignments and monitor that they actually start working as they are supposed to. If an employee is finished working he signs out and the supervisor preregisters his time. The supervisor may also see, that a certain projects does not need any more work and move a stack of employees from one assignment to another. If interviewers are moved between CATI assignments their Interviewer Screen will automatically lead them to the second assignment without them needing to take further action.

When the working day is finished the Supervisor will have an overview of all the preregistered time and be able to make final modifications to the time before final registration.

The Activity Manager consists of two main tabs, namely Pre-Registration and Final Registration. The Pre-Registration tab further consists of two main lists, namely the Ongoing List and the Pre-Registration List. All of them are controlled by the date and time chooser in the top right corner. We will explain each of these in turn below:

The date and time chooser for Activity Manager

The date and time chooser of the activity manager helps the supervisor decide which period he is handling interviewer CATI planning for.

The date and time chooser changed it's logic in version 5.5 with the introduction of UTC and individual time zones (click here (General administration, Time zones and UTC logics in Catglobe) to read more).

Instead of viewing a specific date the activity manager is now showing time for a period. In order to understand this clearly, you must first understand why it does not make much sense to use dates as specifiers of what people are currently at work. If you are managing interviewer sitting in Japan while you yourself are sitting in Alaska, the time zone difference difference may mean that they are in the start of one date where you are still on the prior date's morning. Another situation is, that they will in your date and time understanding start working late one day (e.g. 23:45) and finish early the next date. In other words, we cannot strictly just say that an administrator must administer only CATI activities for one date at a time.

So from v5.5 the logic has been changed so that the activity manager shows shifts for a period of time instead of on a fixed date. In the example above the user is sitting in the time zone called GMT+7 (e.g. Hanoi) and has chosen to view an interval of 20 hours. This means he will see all CATI interviews starting in the next 20 hours from the date and time specified in the time control.

The supervisor of the activity manager will always see the dates and times as understood in his own time zone. On the database, the dates and times are although saved as UTC, and for those interviewers doing the CATI jobs, they will have these date and times converted to their specific time zones when shown in their respective interfaces. There is not currently any way that the supervisor can convert the view to show how the dates and times are understood by the interviewers in their time zones.

Besides the "interval" setting, there is also a web configuration setting on the server deciding how many hours prior to the specified date time that we will show interviewer assignments. This settings is called CATK and can be read more about by clicking here. So the total list of not final registered CATI assignments you will see on the ongoing list (all filter) and pre-registration list will be all those that start between CATK hours before the DATETIME choice in the data and time chooser and Interval hours after.

The CATK settings is although also used for an even more important logic in the activity manager. It specifies how long time an assignment can have been open (on the ongoing list) from its start date and time before it automatically is moved to the pre registration list. This means that you may start to see assignments that have no end time in the pre registration list. In order to move these to the final time registration list you are forced to choose and end time.