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The Quarterly Project BOB Newsletter, Fall 2006

Welcome!

Welcome to the Fall Project BOB Newsletter for all things BOB. Project BOB is the name given to the University’s 3-year long project to replace its core administrative system, and BOB stands for Banner on Board. Banner is the name of the product suite USF purchased from Sungard Higher Education. The intention of this newsletter is to provide the USF Community with highlights about Project BOB during the project’s 3-year life. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions for or about the project, you should feel free to submit them online via our anonymous online feedback form or you can touch base with the Implementation Lead for your area. We welcome your interest and look forward to hearing from you!

To learn more about BOB, check out our recurring "Who - or What - is BOB?" article.

Newsletter Contents

Welcome!
Tick Tock – Tick Tock: BOB Live at USF!
From the VP of Univ. Advancement
How is BOB Spending His Budget?
Faculty Begin to Take Part in Project BOB
From the Leads

Getting Information Out of Banner: Part II
Tech Corner: BOB & Oracle Open World
BOB Tidbits
All Work and No Play...
Who - or What - is BOB?

Tick Tock – Tick Tock: BOB Live at USF!

   Project BOB Underway

Project Start Dec-05
Advancement Feb-07
Finance Jun-07
Student: Admissions Jun-07
Human Resources Jan-08
Financial Aid: Fund Mgmt. Jan-08
Project End Jul-08

Project BOB officially began Dec. 1, 2005, following the signing of USF’s contract with SunGard Higher Education and includes five product areas: Advancement, Finance, Human Resources, Student, and Financial Aid. Except for Advancement and Human Resources, all product areas will be put in production gradually. For example, Banner Student will go live in June 2007 with Admissions related functions -- the remaining areas, such as registration and grading will go live later. The table provided here represents the month/year each product will have its initial production launch.

The high-level project timeline is available online and details more specifically when the various elements of Banner will go into production. While these dates are fairly set at this point in the project, there may be some adjustments to the timing of certain modules as the project progresses. The high-level timeline is updated regularly to reflect any changes.

From the Vice President of University Advancement

 

How is BOB Spending His Budget?

In the Summer 2006 edition of this publication, Tracy Schroeder, our VP for Information Technology, likened the changes BOB has in store for us to a teen trying to chew taffy with her new braces on. What an apt image.

Here’s another: a group of teenagers standing at the edge of a cold ocean waiting for someone to sprint and plunge under a wave. In Advancement, we’ve started to sprint. As the first module implementation at USF, here’s how it feels:

First, make no mistake, change will be happening. And it will be happening with no let-up of the regular demands of your office. I would advise against thinking that only those with primary “migration” responsibility will have their routines affected – we all have a role, from covering for our colleagues, to training as an end-user.

Secondly, the process of adapting your information needs to “Banner-speak” will require clear analysis and respectful negotiation. Prepare to compromise and be warned: you may get to know your colleagues in new ways!

Thirdly, the leadership of the BOB team in ITS can absolutely be relied upon. They are hard-working, smart, and responsive. Like the army of workers standing behind the nerdy Verizon guy in the TV ads (or the beach lifeguard), they are there when you need them.

In conclusion, I’d say forward is the only way to go, and we’re embracing that, struggling to keep our heads, and looking forward to “going live” – taking the plunge. As at the ocean, it feels a little scary and a little fun to be going first.

David F. Macmillan
Vice President, University Advancement

The budget for Project BOB was carefully developed to ensure availability of appropriate funds to cover the implementation of the University's new ERP system. To organize the allocated dollars the following categories were created:

  • Hardware: covers the costs of the server infrastructure needed to support the system.
  • Software: covers the cost of the Banner software and associated applications (job scheduling, reporting, etc.).
  • Storage & Network: covers the cost of additional storage space required to support Banner and any additional network equipment to help ensure network reliance.
  • Implementation & Training: a significant portion of the project budget, these dollars cover the extensive training and consulting for the various University business units associated with the configuration of the Banner system.
  • Personnel Funding: with a project of this size and scope, additional funds were allocated to help ensure we would have the human resources needed to enable a successful implementation.
  • Contingency: all projects should contain a contingency fund. These dollars will help cover any additional expenses not anticipated during the initial budget planning period.

Faculty Begin to Take Part in Project BOB

Of all five products associated with Project BOB, the implementation of Banner Student will take the longest, about 23 months, and will affect the largest population – faculty, staff and students. During the fall, key members of the faculty community re-approached the topic of Project BOB and how it would affect them.

The initial involvement of faculty took place in the spring of 2005 during the requirements gathering phase, prior to release of the request for proposal for a new ERP system. Over the summer of 2005, several faculty members joined staff at the various product demonstrations presented on campus by the three potential ERP vendors: Datatel, Oracle/PeopleSoft and SunGard SCT Banner. Feedback from these presentations was part of a complete evaluation of each vendor’s proposal, which led to the selection of the SunGard SCT Banner suite of applications.

Some of the key Banner Student features that are particularly advantageous to our faculty population are the ability to designate specific roles for faculty (Professor, Advisor, TA), thereby strengthening the security that controls who can/cannot access certain information about students, the ability for faculty to more easily view a student’s records, such as transcripts, application essay, etc., and the addition of features such as a built-in grade book. More information about the Banner Student application can be found by reviewing SunGard’s product sheets for Banner Student and Banner Student & Faculty Self-Service.

In September the Student Implementation Team began the official training and consulting sessions devoted to the configuration of Banner Student. Through feedback from various faculty committees and the efforts of the USF Faculty

Association, two faculty member spaces have been added to the Student Implementation Team, with a particular focus on work associated with advising capabilities.

In addition to faculty participation on the Banner Student team, the following are part of the implementation plan to enable strong faculty participation in the configuration of Banner Student and the learning of the new system:

  • Regular “Town Halls” that will provide faculty members with a forum to seek answers to questions they may have about the new system or provide feedback and suggestions that may help with the implementation.
  • Faculty participation in prototyping of the Banner Student system. This is a key element to the implementation – if it doesn’t get tested properly, how can we know it will work? BOB is looking for faculty who are willing to help prototype. If you are interested, please contact Archie Porter, Registrar and Student Implementation Team Lead.
  • End-User training prior to go-live of the various modules within the Banner Student application, including training on the Self-Service Faculty and Advising Tools, as well as the development of documentation that can be used to support the Banner Student learning environment.

Faculty participation in the Banner Student implementation is important and needed, whether it be at the most detailed level of actually assisting in the configuration of the system or attending training when the time is right. The Project BOB team is open to any feedback faculty have and are willing to answer any questions about the new system. Contact either Archie Porter (email: porter) or Beth Forest, BOB’s project manager (email: forest).

From the Leads

Advancement: Kristopher Young
Advancement is in the challenging position of being the first Banner application to go-live. In fact, we are scheduled to be in production the week of Feb. 19, 2007! In essence, we have nearly completed the configuration of Banner Advancement through the building of the rules and validation tables that define how we do business within Banner. Members of University Advancement have attended numerous training and consulting sessions and spent countless hours experimenting on the system. Our big challenge now is in converting our Plus data into Banner, addressing our reporting (or information access as BOB likes to call it) needs, finishing our prototyping and planning our end-user training. It's been a wild ride and we are looking forward to February!

Finance: Ivy Efendioglu
This September the Finance Implementation Team had our official kick off, starting with chart development, Purchasing and Accounts Payable topics. Over the summer, however, we began the process of preparing for the Banner Finance implementation by performing numerous business process analyses and developing the base for the new chart of accounts. This is the first major step in the Finance implementation and will give USF the opportunity to improve reporting and account monitoring. If you manage any budget accounts, keep your eyes out for more information about the new chart of accounts.

Financial Aid: Susan Murphy
The Financial Aid Team anticipates beginning training and consulting associated with configuring the Banner system for USF in April 2007 - we're the last component of the new system to come up. In the meantime, members of the FA implementation team as well as financial aid and student accounts staff are working as members of the Student implementation team; are training with Advancement, Student and Finance colleagues on their systems; and are active participants in the Business Process Analysis events for the

other systems. We're learning a great deal from each of these activities and find that there are definite advantages to being last.

Human Resources: Martha Peugh-Wade
Human Resources begins training and consulting for Banner HR in February, 2007. As we prepare for the start of training, we have spent a considerable amount of time identifying internal resources that will be required for the project and reviewing our business processes. Like our colleagues on the other implementation teams, we are documenting key business practices in order to aid us when we begin to configure Banner HR to our business needs. A big thank you to those of you who have assisted in our business process analysis (BPAs). We have also worked closely with the rest of the BOB team on reporting needs and document management.

Student: Archie Porter
In September, we officially kicked-off the training and consulting for Banner Student. Prior to our kick-off, we spent considerable time identifying and performing various business process analyses in order to help us and the consultants in the design of the Banner Student environment and to improve our current practices. So far, training has been interesting and we are getting our hands "dirty" as we begin the long process of preparing Banner Student for production. As we get further into the actual set-up for our environment, the Student Team will be asking more and more of the wider University community to attend our regular meetings and training sessions and to serve on specific work groups.

Tech Team: Michael Fraley
The Tech Team is charged with the task of building the back-bone infrastructure for the Banner system and its associated applications (reporting, job scheduling, etc.) and supporting the implementation teams on the training and data conversion efforts. Since last year we have built the test environment for Banner and are now building the production environment. This includes necessary servers, back-up strategies, network testing, and more. On the data conversion side of things, the bulk of the effort here has been working with Advancement on the conversion of the data into the Banner environment. This is a time-consuming and detail-oriented process, but the goal is to import clean and accurate data into Banner.


Getting Information Out of Banner: Part I
The first in a Multi-Part Series

Perhaps one of the bigger changes associated with the implementation of the Banner suite of applications – Advancement, Finance, Financial Aid, Human Resources and Student – is how we will all access information.

In our current system, Plus, in order to extract data a report writer or programmer has to use complex report writing tools like Powerhouse Quiz and Focus, or write a program in COBOL? Sound complicated? It sure can be, and time consuming, too. How often have you been frustrated with the process of taking data given to you in a text format and then having to manipulate it in Excel or import it into a FileMaker Pro database that you then have to manage and update? And let’s not even get into the issue of security when we have confidential data floating around on people’s laptops or sitting on their desks.

Our Banner implementation takes a different approach to accessing the information that resides in our administrative system. The first thing to keep in mind is that Banner is a relational database. This means that the data stored inside Banner can be associated – interconnected – with many other data elements. This is very different from Plus where all the data is stored in a flat-file format – it is simply like a bunch of text files. Relational databases are powerful ways of managing data because you can organize the data more efficiently, which makes accessing data and reporting off of it more flexible.

Of course it will take time to realize the benefits of the new Banner relational environment. First and foremost will be the need to decide what information we need and want. Is it possible to go to a form within Banner and get the data result needed without ever even stepping into the realm of “report writing”? Given the variety of ways we can access information in Banner we will need to rethink when and how we should pull information from the system and in what format. Do we still need that 40 page report? Do we still need to maintain that external FileMaker Pro database? Then, of course, will be the need for training. In addition to Banner functionality related to accessing data, we have also selected the Oracle Tools, Discoverer and Reports, to be our primary report writing tools. While training will be central, proper access needs to be determined and we will need to address potential security concerns.

All these new features and tools aside, getting used to information access within our new ERP environment will take a shift in how we, as an organization, think about reporting.

These questions and more will be addressed as we progress with our implementation. Check in our Spring 2007 newsletter for Part II of our series on “Getting Information out of Banner” to learn more about how we are tackling this important element of Project BOB.

Tech Corner
BOB Attends Oracle OpenWorld


Can you spot BOB?

Bay Bridge commuters to USF may have been challenged by Oracle’s massive OpenWorld conference held at the Moscone Center in October, but BOB tech team members were in hog heaven training up on Oracle’s newest technologies. Most of you may know that Banner is the Project BOB software suite provided by Sungard Higher Education, but did you know that Banner sits on top of several layers of Oracle Corporation’s leading technologies? You may be hearing and seeing more about Sungard, but rest assured there is plenty of Bay Area technology serving as the foundation of our newest systems.

Banner actually sits on top of Oracle’s latest database and application server platforms while leveraging Oracle’s world-

class data, security, enterprise management, and business intelligence capabilities. Consequently, Sungard is allowed to focus on the on-going enhancement of their acclaimed administrative and collaboration applications. In other words, Project Bob is taking advantage of the best capabilities that these two vendors have to offer.


The importance of Oracle technology is reflected by Project BOB’s total software budget, which is distributed above

In addition to Banner, Oracle is used by USF’s Blackboard, USFconnect, OneCard, and Pinnacle Phone Billing systems. Although Oracle’s technology may not always be readily visible, it will continue to play an increasingly prominent role in the delivery of USF’s most valued information services.

BOB Tidbits

   All Work and No Play...
  • Learning About BOB:
    Learn about, and keep up-to-date on Project BOB by visiting the Project BOB.
  • Project BOB High-Level Timeline:
    Curious as to how long this project will take and when the different Banner products will be going-live? Check our our High-Level Timeline.
  • Project BOB Milestones:
    No project is manageable unless there are milestones to help us track our progress. Check out BOB's by reviewing our High-Level Milestones.
  • Monthly Status Reports:
    Check out our recent online Monthly Status Reports– just log-in with your USFconnect username and password.
  • Feeding BOB:
    Have a question about Project BOB? Want to provide some feedback to the Project Team? Feel free to submit anonymous online feedback – just log-in with your USFconnect username and password.

This Fall our Project BOB Team has been hard at work. Whether in training, working with consultants, or on their own, the team is working away at making BOB successful. While this is work, be assured there is nothing dull about BOB! Click on the pictures below to see a larger version of the photo and a description of what these folks are up to!

   

Who – or What – is BOB?

By now many of you have probably heard about Project BOB either through some posting in USFconnect or through a colleague. But BOB has heard through the grapevine that there are still some questions as to what he’s all about. Project BOB is the name given to the University’s 3-year long project to replace its core administrative system, and BOB stands for Banner on Board. Banner is the SunGard Higher Education suite of products purchased by the University to replace our current administrative system, SunGard SCT Plus. The University’s administrative system, which is referred to as an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, encompasses the following core administrative systems: Advancement, Finance, Human Resources, Student, and Financial Aid.

The administrative system is the core system for the University and we can’t live without it!

Our current administrative environment, SCT Plus (ADS, FRS, HRS, SIS), is reaching the end of its life (it’s about 20 years old – ancient in its world) and this is one of the core reasons why the University decided to replace the system. In addition to addressing the end-of-life issue, Banner will also bring significant improvements. Some enhancements will be full access through a web interface – no more DataComet or other telnet-like application will be needed – near 24/7 access, easier reporting capabilities, better opportunities to improve services to our students and expanded self-service capabilities such as online purchase requisitions, e-timesheets for staff, and more.

Once a more robust test environment is established, we will offer some demonstrations of the Banner system so the University Community can see Banner and get an idea of what this new world of information looks like. To learn more about the project, please check out our Project BOB website.

(Taken from our Summer '06 Newsletter)

Project BOB | BOB's USF Intranet | USF | ITS