Finance
Vic DeCola and Mike Geglio, the leads of the Renovare Finance team reported
that the first draft of the chart of financial accounts had been loaded
into Banner. They said work was progressing on Endowment financials and
that baseline Banner meets at least 80% of our endowment business process.
One of the biggest challenges, according to DeCola
and Geglio, is dealing with simultaneous critical
paths. Also, there are some deliverables that still
lack definition of standards and scope, and too
often, critical training schedules leave little
time for working on the deliverables.
Increasingly, communications will become a critical
success factor according to the Finance Team leads.
Both inter-project and external cross-campus communications
are in direct proportion to the scope of the project,
they said.
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Development Team
Team leads Katherine Rosswurm and Donna
Adams reported that all of the ACT demographic
and biographic data has been converted, and now
is available through the Advance Oracle application
and is refreshed nightly. In addition, eight of
the 13 ACT databases used by regional development
directors have been converted to Advance as of
September 25, 2003. Advance is a user interface
from Sungard BSR Inc. used to manage and access
data stored in Oracle databases.
Adams and Rosswurm noted all 13 of the ACT databases
were a little different, which meant that each
conversion had its on challenge.
The team leads said there had been strong support
from Notre Dame database personnel that the Development
Team had benefited from a knowledgeable Sungard
BSR consultant, although earlier on, there had
been excessive turnover among of the vendor-assigned
consultants.
Lessons learned, according to Adams and Rosswurm,
including the need for ongoing communications among
constituents in the Development Department and
the importance of going through all of the steps
specified in the planning process.
Sponsorship, too, is critical to the success of
the Development Team’s effort. Toward that
end, Rosswurm announced that David Morrissey, senior
director of University Relations had assumed the
role of Development sponsor.
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Ancillary Team
The Health Services implementation
went live on May 24, 2003 said John Kelly, the
technical lead for the Ancillary Team.
The new Health Services systems shows on screen
who is scheduled to come in for appointments, and
enables ND healthcare personnel to enter a diagnosis
code(s) for services and automatically post charges
to the appropriate student account.
Kelly said the Security Dispatch system, which
went live on August 4, 2003, enables dispatch personnel
to log minor events, such as building checks and
also maintain records on more serious offenses
that are considered an actual crime. Dispatchers
also can see in real time the location of campus
security officers, and thereby, dispatch the officer
that’s closest to a logged event. >>more
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(Ancillary
Team continued) Some
of the more positive elements of developing and
implementing the Health Services and Security Dispatch
systems included weekly technical team meetings
with OIT database personnel and representatives
from OIT Operations and Engineering, Information
Security and Network Engineering. Another plus
was the development of training scripts for system
training, according to Kelly.
Still, there were some things that could have
gone more smoothly, Kelly said. Approaching training
of end user personnel on a need-to-know basis instead
of immersing users in every aspect of the system,
for example, would have saved time and provided
a better experience for users, Kelly explained.
Also, Kelly said, the team learned through experience
to set expectations for time available among functional
personnel.
-----------------------------------
Information Delivery Team
Technical lead Dale Carter said the catalog of
finance core operational reports was complete.
Carter added that her team had been successful
in hiring and team building. Of particular value,
according to Carter, were the site visits her team
made at the University of Illinois and Wayne State
University.
-----------------------------------
Infrastructure Team
“The more we looked at Banner, the more
it looked like a database application, said Steve
Tapp, technical lead for the team. Because of that,
Bruno Zovich will now serve share technical lead
duties with Tapp.
The Infrastructure Team was the first team out
of the gate, according to Tapp. “We were
running around doing Banner installation work the
week of June 2 during the Renovare kickoff.
There now is a virtual private network (VPN) set
up to provide secure access to Banner development
server, Tapp noted. Also, the consulting firm Collegis
is now on site to help with help with infrastructure
development.
Although Banner training is now well under way,
Tapp said decisions on the production platform
caused some delays in training. There also are
some personnel backfill challenges going forward
as more of OIT’s operations and engineering
people are transferred to the Renovare project,
Tapp added.
Related Stories:
>>Renovare
Teams Review Progress at Quarterly Huddle
>> Keep
the Vision (presentation by Chuck Lennon)
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