IMPLEMENTATION PROJECT TEAM
Minutes for meeting of March 12, 1999

Members present:Tony Cabasco, Nancy Farrington, Jeremy Floberg, Peter Harvey, Susan Healy, Deborah Hopkinson, Stephanie Johnson, Denise Mann, Jenny Miles, Keiko Pitter, Cindy Waring.

Review Activities of Each Implementation Team
This will happen once teams get started. Tony asked what the teams should be doing now. Keiko said to identify workflow: inputs, process, and outputs.
Inputs: what are the sources of information for the office and what is the purpose of collecting it?
Process: identify the workflows and map the processes involved. Do just enough workflow mapping to identify what's necessary at that point. Do a general workflow, identify who the players are. May need to ask an office to map their process even though their implementation date is later, because the process is needed for another office.
Output: Reports. Identify the reports needed, standard and ad hoc. It's possible that ad-hoc reports really are standard once you've figured out how often they are run. Stephanie asked if we would get a list of standard reports supplied with the product. The answer is yes, and Cindy pointed out that HR comes with about 200 standard reports.

There was a brief discussion about the use of WID or SSN as the ID. The consensus was that WID would be in the alternate ID field and SSN would not be used as an ID (problems with historical data, generally not recommended).

Review Status Report for the Trustees
A workflow improvement study is required for the trustees to approve funding for the next phase. Susan is working on documenting the transcript request process and Keiko will put this together for the trustees next week.

Discuss/Review Datatel User's Group Meeting
Some topics mentioned:

  • Stephanie thought there would be benefits from moving to Colleague, but expressed concerns about communications management. Tony clarified that while the communications management seemed to work well in Datatel, they were worried about getting the data from Colleague to Word. Cindy mentioned that she had found out that Release 17 (due out in October) is supposed to include improvements to this module.
  • Jenny mentioned that a lot of information was presented, and even the worst session had something useful (like the naming convention for processes).
  • Cindy said that the learning lab was very helpful and she thought the HR consultant there was excellent (Don from SF). She thought that the more hands-on time people get in our training room, the better they will feel. Keiko added that the training room in Mem was for that purpose, and since the project manager will have his/her office there too, there will be someone there to answer questions.
  • Tony learned that the big learning curve actually comes a year or so after going live. After we know how the vanilla version works, then we have to figure out what we really want to do.
  • Many other institutions had problems, but our planning has already anticipated some of these issues, such as additional staffing and running parallel with the legacy system.
  • One "do" is to listen to Datatel. If they recommend entering data manually instead of converting it, take their advice. Another school, which didn't, had a lot of problems.
  • Cindy learned that we shouldn't start doing ad-hoc reports until we understand all the Datatel reports. Otherwise we might be writing a report which actually already exists. Tony added that we shouldn't insist on using our own format - use the existing reports instead.
  • Tony and others had heard about a record locking problem, where people couldn't run reports if someone else has a file open. Some schools had problems, others didn't. We'll find out more about this.
  • Cindy said we shouldn't reinvent the wheel. Use contacts at other schools to find out how they do things. For example, Northern Idaho College is going live April 1 on the same versions we have.
  • Regional users' group conference is June 21-23 at Lewis & Clark College in Portland.

    Coming Activities

  • Peter and Keiko will meet with Datatel to sign the contract March 18.
  • Keiko is working on scheduling HR and FinAid training.

    Action Items

  • All implementation teams should be working on identifying their workflows (inputs, processes and outputs) and mapping the processes.
  • Core needs to come up with a naming scheme for workflows, to identify where handoffs are and make sure every process is mapped.
  • Cindy needs the position ID from the Core team before she can bring up HR.
  • Susan - find out about improvements planned for communications management in release 17.
  • Susan - find out about going straight to release 17 instead of 16 (which we have just installed).
  • Susan - find out the definition of A and B level bugs.
  • Susan - find out details on the record locking conflict issue.
  • Everyone should let Keiko know which sessions were especially useful and she will add links to those proceedings to the AIS web site.

    There will be no IPT meeting next week due to the WCTS staff retreat.