Enterprise Systems Committee
CMS Steering Committee (CSC)
Minutes of January 31, 2000
Present: Biechler, Praizler, Russell, Miller, Hannigan, McElroberts, Taylor, Rinne, Ryan,
Graham Don, Graham Dennis, Sneed and Wellman.
FAST TRACK ITEMS
CMS Technical Architecture —
A PowerPoint document and a visual concept paper were distributed. A final version of
these will be posted in couple of weeks. There are major issues for the relationships with
our own computing environment and interfaces. This is still broad based and not subject
to the kind of detailed analysis it will need in the future. Will need to carefully scrutinize
the final document when it is done in a few weeks. Crystal Reports will be one of the
tools we will need in order to get a full suite of reports from the service centers.
Status reports —
The Leads from each of our functional teams will be asked to provide a status update at
each of the Steering Committee meetings. This will be a brief update on the status of the
team's work.
Praizler reported that HR is working with deliverables using a single copy of PeopleSoft.
They are looking at business process guides hoping to pull out a process that can be used.
Hannigan reported that the student team is in its formative stages. They have identified
people to attend the Dallas conference.
Wellman noted that his area has been working on process mapping (on EDP purchase
processes with some IR staff), and this work and their experience would be of great value
to the rest of the effort.
PeopleSoft SIG in Dallas —
Funding was approved up to $36,000. The deadline for pre-registration is today. It was
agreed to get people registered ASAP in order to take advantage of the discounted fee
and that 5 seats to each area would be allocated, and that the Team Leads (HR, FIN,
STU, TECH) would work out any additional attendance changes as necessary.
AGENDA
1. Project Planning —
A recent GartnerGroup Research Note (distributed) is showing PeopleSoft still ahead
of other companies with regard to Human Resources management systems, in the midmarket range.
Ryan distributed and discussed another document on project management issues which
was a partial extract from a larger document. Because of intellectual property constraints,
it's okay to examine the ideas but we couldn't use the document itself at this time. This
document is an example of one approach of many project management approaches
possible. Whatever we use, we will need to focus, as illustrated in the document, on areas
like project goals and objectives, assumptions (financial, organizational, etc.), context
diagram, external agents, project deliverables, organizational scope, temporal scope,
related projects, definitions of major roles and responsibilities, change management,
decision making, status reporting (to various audiences), quality review, the knowledge
base, and project management structures overall.
John Miller shared a condensed Chico CMS timeline reflecting the latest information
available from the Chancellor's Office. It now appears likely that we will have at least 2
years before the software product is delivered to any non-first wave campuses.
John provided three possible scenarios, with the earliest showing 9/01 as delivery of
software, and 2 other more likely timelines. January of 2002 now appears to be the
earliest realistic time, and even that is uncertain given the unknowns still ahead.
Estimated dates will probably firm up as 1st wave campuses start to implement (mid
2001 approximately).
We need to continue to work on readiness and complete as many items as we can ahead
of implementation. However, we need to keep in mind that if delivery of the product is
two+ years, the environment will change, and what is readiness today may not be relevant
at that time. Accordingly, we are building into our timeline a 2-phased readiness
approach. We expect to have the results of the pilot readiness evaluation at Cal State
Long Beach available soon.
Timing for back filling positions was discussed, given the new information on the overall
CSU schedule. This will vary from position to position. General feeling was that it would
be better to bring people on board sooner rather than too late which could create
production problems, and that the investment would be well worth it. We will be revising
the budget projections very soon for next fiscal year given the new data.
"The Good, The Bad, The Ugly" — This document reviewing Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) installations was previously distributed via e-mail. Ryan noted that
although there are many ERP horror stories, about 65% do end up with satisfied users.
Also, it is not only ERP projects that fail (about 26% of IT projects in general fail), but
ERP projects do have some special danger elements. The success factors for the
installations with the highest success rate were pointed out (e.g., good project
management). For the rather lengthy interim period we have facing us before software
delivery, and before a permanent Project Director is hired, Ryan suggested we appoint
facilitators and divide our ERP effort as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Overall project management (including goals) — John Miller
Managing resources (budget and people) — Arno Rethans
Creating and selling a vision — George Wellman
Managing change — Don Graham
The facilitators will bring back to the Steering Committee ideas and suggested plans for
addressing the issues, and John Miller will work with each to identify deliverables for
Steering Committee consideration.
The position announcement for a Project Director is being developed and will use the
experience of 1st wave campuses. It was mentioned that we will have "sticker shock"
when we see the salary levels for such positions. Budget issues need to be mapped
against time lines to determine the project's effect on next year's budget. CSU, Long
Beach has an organization chart that may be of interest.
2. Communication Plan
The Communication Plan is the vehicle for getting the project vision and appropriate
messages out to the stakeholders in the various areas of the campus. Miller is working on
a draft of our overall communications plan and we need to determine what's going on,
what messages need to get across, and the means we use to do this. CSU also has a CMS
communication plan which we will need to be in sync with.
3. Other
Wellman brought up the issue of data warehousing and the Brio Broadcast web-based
approach. Warehousing is becoming increasingly important , and we need to strategize
since it is and will be taking a lot of time and resources. The campus needs to standardize
and settle on the warehousing technologies we use since they will be in place, given the
drawn out CSM timeline, for many years. Campus users will requires services for that
extended interim period, and this is another facet of the "bridge" strategy we have been
using.
Warehousing, in the overall CMS plan, remains basically a campus responsibility and
cost. It was noted that the "Target 2000" Team is also discussing the long term
environment, and they will bring relevant recommendations and suggestions to this group
as well. We need a high level technical architecture for the Chico campus similar to
CMS, but not a mirror of CMS. This is a task for our Technical Team which will need to
work along with the user departments. For our next meeting McElroberts was asked to
bring a status report on how we will address the matter.
~ Adjourned 12:20.
On call, keep time slot open.