ConnectCarolina: Enterprise Resource Planning

Starlight is a component project of ConnectCarolina. It is a new version of StARS (Student Award Reporting System), which is a comprehensive system to collect and report all funds, especially departmental awards, given to a student in support of their attendance at the University.

As PeopleSoft (PS) is implemented to replace the University’s legacy student systems, a new version of StARs is needed because:

• There is no component of PeopleSoft that provides the functions needed by campus users, and currently delivered by StARS
• StARS is written in an incompatible computer language and cannot be interfaced with PeopleSoft

The functionality provided by StARs must be maintained because:

• Audit requirements state that campus departments are required to notify the Office of Scholarships and Student Aid (OSSA) of departmental awards so that OSSA will not over-award the student’s financial aid package
• The University needs to maintain a system to administer Graduate School In-state and Tuition Remission Awards
• The University needs to enforce the policy for charging in-state tuition to the student’s salary source (Federal Circular A-21 Guideline, as interpreted by the Office of Sponsored Research)

Starlight will be implemented in two phases:

• Phase I: the data entry phase for Starlight; campus users will enter their data and it will be fed to PeopleSoft Financial Aid; the go-live is Feb. 2010
• Phase II: the accounting phase where we will take what is produced from Student Financials and feed data to the FRS accounting system; the go-live is June 2010

A Stakeholder committee has been formed to advise the Starlight development team; members include representatives from the Office of Scholarships and Student Aid, Student Accounts and University Receivables, and the Graduate and Professional Schools. Starlight users are involved in the project by reviewing and providing input on functionality and on the selection of fields for reports. Team leaders are Beverly Wyrick, Director of Finance and Administration, Graduate School, and David Langham, Starlight Project Manager for ITS.
 

Implementing ConnectCarolina presents unique challenges to ITS. It is a huge, multi-faceted endeavor that will fundamentally transform the University’s administrative systems. As such, it requires a professional and disciplined approach to planning, organizing and managing resources. Project management is being utilized to help the ConnectCarolina team successfully complete specific project goals and objectives.

Project management employs various methodologies to keep a project on track, on time and within budget. It typically begins early in the project with assessments of cost, risk, quality, communications, time, change, procurement and required resources. Project managers bring a specialized skill set for the planning, execution and closing of a project, and often attain certification by professional project management associations.

There are distinct tasks, technical skills and management methodologies for ongoing operations and projects:

• Operational programs are permanent functional work to support products or services
  • Operational or working managers have typically come from the ranks and may retain hands-on duties in addition to managing people
• Projects are temporary endeavors with a defined beginning and end designed to meet particular goals and objectives
  • Project managers are often shared or pooled resources, hired for their expertise and track record, and do not have direct people management responsibilities; they are typically assigned to manage one or more projects at a time

In the Campus Solutions implementation, the ConnectCarolina project is playing some catch-up, since project managers came on board after that project was already underway, and have been working to determine resource needs and secure those resources while maintaining deadlines for deliverables. The HR and Finance implementations will benefit from earlier involvement of project managers.

Within ConnectCarolina, a Project Management Office (PMO) is being established with the creation of a PMO director to whom project managers for the various project components will report. In the future, the PMO will be a part of the Office of the CIO and serve the larger ITS community so that there will be consistency and continuity of project management methods, processes and tools.

The initial step that will lead to the first build in ConnectCarolina of the Schedule of Classes was successfully completed on Sept. 26-27, 2009, when the course catalog conversion took place. The load of the course catalog included 210,439 rows of data representing 27,148 distinct courses – the entire course inventory that was in the current Student Information System (SIS) going as far back as 1953. When this conversion is validated by the Office of the University Registrar, schedulers around campus will be able to begin building the Schedule of Classes for Fall 2010 (around the first week of October).

In addition, the migration of Ad Astra was completed on the same date. Ad Astra is a third-party product that the University uses for event-management and room-scheduling. A real-time interface between Ad Astra and ConnectCarolina complements the Schedule of Classes process:

• Schedulers enter class information (when the class is taking place, who is teaching the class, what the enrollment capacity is, etc.) into ConnectCarolina; this information flows into Ad Astra
• Schedulers enter room requirements (type, size, equipment, etc.) into Ad Astra, which assigns rooms; room assignments flow from Ad Astra into ConnectCarolina

Next steps in the Student Records implementation are:

• Program and plan – PeopleSoft-speak for degree programs and majors (scheduled to go live in late October) – all 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 degrees.
• Conversion of the schedule of classes – all scheduled sections of classes in SIS back to 1953 – scheduled to be completed in mid-November
• Conversion of Student Enrollments records totaling more than 10.4 million records – scheduled to be completed in mid-November

All of these implementations are steps toward student registration for Fall 2010 that will take place in ConnectCarolina in spring 2010.

Training is already underway to help staff prepare for the Schedule of Classes build and will continue through December. In addition, ConnectCarolina Training will offer support sessions in which schedulers can receive help actually building their schedule of classes.

The content for each Schedule of Classes training session will include:

• Introduction to ConnectCarolina
• PeopleSoft Basics
• Course Catalog
• Single Section Classes
• Multi-Section Classes
• Multi-Component Classes
• Combined Sections

Please visit the ConnectCarolina Current Schedule of Workshops and click on the workshop title to:

• View its description and any prerequisites
• Register online