What is PeopleSoft Campus Solutions?
The Student Administration part of the Mosaic Project involves implementing portions of Oracle's PeopleSoft ‘Campus Solutions' software suite. These components include:
♦ Campus Community (person- and organization-oriented biographical and demographic data)
♦ Academic Structure (the University's academic program inventory and organization)
♦ Student Records
♦ Admissions
♦ Academic Advising (degree audit)
♦ Student Financials
♦ Financial Aid
PeopleSoft Campus Solutions is a market leader, a mature product used to successfully conduct university business at hundreds of public and private institutions around the world, including both NAU and ASU. There are a large number of very experienced consultants, knowledge experts, and software engineers available to assist schools in implementing the product. In addition, there is a very active user group, the Higher Education User Group, HEUG, which assists universities and Oracle itself in enriching the functionality of current and future releases of the product.
The U of A has fit business processes around the software as much as possible. A project-wide decision-making apparatus was designed to evaluate requests for customization. The basic theme is to start with the delivered software, and not with existing business processes. An iterative approach has been adopted based on experience with other large scale system implementations.
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The first iteration was to configure the software and demonstrate the ability to follow a few students through their lifecycle from admissions through graduation. This exercise transformed all of the basic elements of the university's business into the PeopleSoft context.
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The second iteration followed the same lifecycle for a larger and more diverse population of students. This entailed a more robust configuration, and identified some local business processes that needed to be modified.
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The third and all following iterations continued the process of increased complexity of configuration to accommodate more existing populations.Knowledge of the software grew through these iterations and judgments about what business process changes are needed grew along with that.
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All Student Administration modules are now live.
UAccess Student and UAccess Employee: Project Completion to Sustainment
Putting in a large enterprise system is like building a new home - the maintenance and enhancement work continues after the “move in”, or in this case implementation date. As soon as you go live with any of these large enterprise systems, the main implementation project is done but a whole suite of follow-on projects begin, in part, because until the complete system is in, it is difficult to intimately know the software or really understand all the nuances of all the business processes. All of the tweaking and tuning that ideally you’d like to do before hand can only happen after some of the basics are in. We are in that mode now and we refer to that as “sustaining mode.”
UAccess Employee and UAccess Student specifically are now implemented and in sustaining mode. In line with this new phase and a successful implementation, Co-implementation Directors for UAccess Student, Suellyn Hull and Tom Bourgeois are rolling off of the Mosaic Project and returning to their former departments. Meanwhile, University Information Technology Services (UITS) is gearing up to be fully responsible for sustaining these new systems and coordinating priorities with the campus units.
The UITS sustaining team is comprised of the people, processes, and technology to enable this ongoing support. Marcia Chatalas, formerly the Mosaic Project Implementation Director for the new Human Resources system, and Lori Shinn, Assistant Director in UITS will now lead the ongoing sustainment group for UAccess Employee and Student. This work is incorporated under the Enterprise Applications portfolio of services, though it certainly involves many campus constituents and other UITS and Mosaic staff. These services include the UAccess Employee and Student systems, in addition to many other applications and services supporting campus wide operations such as D2L, iTunesU, Web Services and logical access provisioning. This portfolio is the responsibility of Liz Taylor, DCIO and Interim Senior Director, Enterprise Applications.
What does this mean for campus?
The transition from project status to sustaining mode will essentially be transparent to campus. The sustainment group will work closely with teams within the UITS Client and Infrastructure Services group (24/7 IT Support Center, the Environment team, and Security and Access Management) to ensure that the systems are managed well and that clients receive an exceptional level of customer service. Campus will continue to use the Mosaic Community and the Mosaic website to exchange ideas and learn of system news and updates.
Over the next year or two the University will see strong and steady maturation and improvement of the systems on all sides. The teams supporting the systems will continue growing their skill levels; the user community will continue learning the new systems and becoming more comfortable with them; the systems will be modified and improved in an evolutionary way; and our user documentation will continue to expand.