ConnectCarolina: Enterprise Resource Planning

After many long hours and two weekends of especially intense effort, the ConnectCarolina team achieved a major milestone by successfully converting 10.6 million enrollment records from SIS into PeopleSoft. This is the final step toward the February release of registation for Fall 2010 classes.

It follows conversion of:

• Course catalog (Sept. 2009)
• Academic program and degree records in SIS back to 1953, including more than 1.4 million rows of data, almost 350,000 students and more than 250,000 awarded degree (Nov. 2009)
• Schedule of classes for Fall 2010 (built by staff throughout the University during fall 2009)

"The team worked exceptionally long hours with intense dedication and focus to complete the final steps of this conversion over the last 10 days – not to mention the countless hours spent over many months to make this all possible," said Jerri Bland, Executive Director of Enterprise Applications. "It took a major effort by the student records, conversion, infrastructure, and Office of the Registrar teams to achieve this major step."

The team doesn't have much time to "bask" in this success as more critical targets are just around the corner, including user acceptance testing for the February release.

Admissions
The ConnectCarolina Admissions and Support teams, along with the Undergraduate Admissions office staff, handled the second admissions application deadline in January. Daily conference calls and a war room staffed with analysts addressed any issues. The next major focus is the release of admissions decisions.

Graduate and Professional Admissions workshops continue, with the team validating all requirements for business processes and online application. Functional specification documentation is underway for the online application and application evaluation.

Student Records
Work will continue with the reporting team to ensure that any critical reports needed through March will be delivered at cutover. A final view of the roles each user needs in production is being prepared and will be submitted by Jan. 29.

Financial Aid
Financial Aid remains focused on a combined Integration Testing and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for all batch processing and UAT for other important areas. The team is also doing testing and making changes as needed to adjust to the impact of an update to PeopleSoft that is scheduled to be released the weekend of Feb. 5-7. Work will continue with the reporting team to ensure that any critical reports needed through March will be delivered at cutover.

Academic Advisement
Work is ongoing to size the effort and schedule the work related to making the change for double majors. A decision has been made to return to the current system of double majors as two majors or plans in PeopleSoft speak (previously, the decision has been to consider double majors as one plan – for example, a history/English major instead of a history and English double major). Work also continues with Degree Audit Specialists to resolve standing issues with the audit. A decision was made on how to configure the foreign language requirement; this allows for work to complete the build and begin the testing of several majors.

Student Financials
Testing for tuition calculation and billing has been completed in the test environment successfully. In the next weeks, the team will be verifying and testing these processes in the integrated environment for scenario testing. Functional testing continues through January and February for all completed modifications and interfaces.Item type mapping has been completed and an initial run of the student balances conversion will be reviewed and loaded into PeopleSoft for scenario testing. Third-party proxy and self-service capabilities are in development for completion in February.

Two major go-lives are coming up for ConnectCarolina:

• Jan. 25: go-live of enrollment data conversion in Student Records
• Feb. 22: go-live of Financial Aid and the registration component of Student Records

The ConnectCarolina team and staff from the Office of the University Registrar and the Office of Scholarships and Student Aid worked diligently through December, preparing for these major go-lives. Year-end testing goals were met prior to the winter holidays. However, testing and data validation continues.

Meanwhile, staff around the University have completed building the majority of the Schedule of Classes in ConnectCarolina. This is step three on the path to the new registration system; course catalog (step one, live Sept. 2009), program/plan (step two, live Nov. 2009) and enrollment data conversion (step four, going live Jan. 23) are the other steps in the process.

User acceptance testing is about to begin for the registration process in ConnectCarolina. Working with Student Government, the team is identifying students to participate in testing beginning Jan. 18. Plans are also underway to provide outreach and support to students to help them understand how to register in ConnectCarolina. All students will register for Fall 2010 classes in ConnectCarolina starting in late March.

Here is an update on other ConnectCarolina activities:

Undergraduate Admissions
The Admissions team is working on end-to-end admissions processing, additional requirements for the Nursing application, and report development.

Graduate and Professional Schools Admissions
Workshops are underway to validate previously gathered requirements for business processes, the online application and application evaluation. Report requirements are also being gathered and revalidated during workshops. The design of the graduate and professional schools application is nearly complete and will be shared with the affected schools by the end of January.

Financial Aid
This team, like Student Records, is also heavily into unit, scenario and integration testing. User acceptance testing will be done by the Office of Scholarships and Student Aid staff, with go-live scheduled for Feb. 22.

Student Financials
With this go-live scheduled for June, functional and technical work is continuing:

• A walkthrough of the billing functional process has been completed.
• Third party proxy capabilities are in technical development for completion by the end of February.
• Testing and sign-off of tuition group calculation and Starlight components have been completed.
• Review of temporary stops and holds is wrapping up.
• Unit testing continues.

Advisement

This go-live is scheduled for October. A decision has been made to return to the current system of double majors as two majors or plans in PeopleSoft speak (previously, the decision has been made to consider double majors as one plan – for example, a history/English major instead of a history and English double major). Progress has been made in determining the approach and timing for changes related to splitting double majors in PeopleSoft, and will be implemented around the end of April.

Other advisement activities:

• The team has received final confirmation on degree-level requirements for all four undergraduate level degrees and appropriate changes will be created in the PeopleSoft Advisement module;
• Functional specifications are complete for the GPA Calculator Interface and for the Advisor and Committee Assignment conversion
• About 20 % of all the majors have been built and successfully tested

Training
The ConnectCarolina training team conducted Schedule of Classes training and associated help sessions throughout the fall. The team is also completing the documentation of processes for staff training in Student Records and Financial Aid, and continuing work with the ConnectCarolina project team to finalize training required for processes related to SEVIS, transfer credits, and application evaluation for junior transfers.

As ConnectCarolina modules move into production, support activities continue to expand with a consistent focus on providing 24/7/365 support for critical issues. Operational support is a critical component of the fully integrated ConnectCarolina administrative system, including development of new procedures and processes specifically for the new environment as well as incorporation of existing help operations.

(Just a reminder that the first stop for ConnectCarolina help is the Help Desk which can be reached by calling 962-HELP or logging a Remedy ticket through online help support at http://help.unc.edu/index.htm.)

Operational support is now being provided for Undergraduate Admissions, junior transfer processes in specific schools and programs, and Student Records. Ongoing meetings are held with ConnectCarolina functional analysts and project managers, and staff from affected offices and the Help Desk to review open Remedy tickets and address any concerns.

With a number of go-lives coming up in February and March, the ConnectCarolina support team has already established Remedy groups for Student Records, Financial Aid and Student Financials. To plan for post go-live support, the support team meets with staff from ConnectCarolina functional areas, reporting and training, and from the Help Desk and Remedy.

Ongoing operational support includes:

• Weekly operations meetings to coordinate system maintenance for all ConnectCarolina components (ID management, the my.unc.edu portal, TouchNet, ImageNow, etc.)
• A calendar of administrative high peak times and ConnectCarolina scheduled maintenance windows
• Preparation for periods of peak usage (for example, admissions application deadlines) with triage procedures and on-call and escalation plans to ensure that all issues are resolved promptly

To manage operational support, the ConnectCarolina team has developed Remedy ticket reports, including a weekly detail listing of individual tickets and their age, and daily open tickets and control reports. In addition, operational support staff meets (as needed) with individual Remedy groups to address any outstanding tickets.

Ongoing and future support activities include:

• Continued development of processes and procedures for managing applications at both the operational and infrastructure levels
• Development of service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators used to define and measure successful service delivery
• Continued assessment of the Help Desk, ConnectCarolina functional staff and end users support model
• Development of procedures and processes for enhancement requests