ctcLink Project Quality Assurance Monthly Report January...

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ctcLink Project Quality Assurance

Monthly Report – January 2016

Presented to:

Washington State Board for

Community and Technical Colleges

By:

1215 Hamilton Lane, Suite 200

Naperville, IL 60540 www.MoranTechnology.com Voice & Fax: 877-212-6379

http://www.morantechnology.com/

Monthly Report –January 2016 ctcLink Project Quality Assurance

Table of Contents

Executive Summary ......................................................................................................................................................... 3

Project Status Summary ................................................................................................................................................. 4 ctcLink Assessment Scorecards ................................................................................................................................... 4

Project Management Office (PMO) ............................................................................................................................. 7

PeopleSoft Functional Solution (PS) ........................................................................................................................... 9

Technical Solution (Tech) ............................................................................................................................................ 11

Organizational Change Management & Communication (OCM) ....................................................................... 12

Testing and Training (TT) ........................................................................................................................................... 14

Managed Services (MS) ................................................................................................................................................ 15

Support Services (SS) ................................................................................................................................................... 16


Executive Summary

MTC is conducting regular quality assurance reviews of the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges’ ctcLink Initiative. The ctcLink project will provide the foundation for the next generation of services to students, faculty, and staff in an environment that enables them to self-manage their data and experiences. It will leverage and enhance the inherent efficiencies of the 34 college system through the implementation of a single, centrally provided system of online student and administrative functions. This report is intended to provide a periodic assessment of the key components of the major project initiative. This report is based on in-person and phone interviews with key project personnel and our review of documentation uploaded by the various teams to the SharePoint sites as well as any critical items that we may need to follow

up on based on the previous assessments.

The PMO organization continued to evolve with the new leadership team.

Several resources have left the team in the past month.

Some resources are being reassigned to other responsibilities where their knowledge can be better utilized to support the project.

The PMO is trying to move the implementation and support teams to a more nimble organization with people feeling more empowered to make intelligent decisions. The PMO continues to evaluate the on-going demands of the go-live support and the knowledge transfer issues that exist in between SBCTC support, project, and colleges and adjust accordingly.

The project is still hampered by the initial lack of training on the business processes prior to Go-Live but is trying to catch up. There are some positive actions that are or will be occurring:

The team will be meeting with Tacoma staff to review the list of 242 business processes to determine current status. Using a red/yellow/green stoplight status approach, there are many processes which are considered in one status by the project team and a different status by the colleges. These two days of meetings will help achieve consensus on each business process and next steps if necessary.

Andy Duckworth has moved from Tacoma to the Olympia project team and put in charge of training. Andy has great ideas around how to develop better training around the business processes that can be used before Go-Live but also after implementation to help users understand the processes better. These efforts need to be appropriately defined and resourced to maximize success.

The FirstLink colleges are being pushed to achieve stabilization by the end of January. This is probably not feasible based on the current state of the solution; however, the push to stabilization is an important one. Stabilization must be achieved in order for the colleges to move to optimization – using the system to better support its students and other stakeholders. Based on our conversations with them, Tacoma is very interested in optimization but it cannot get there without a thorough understanding of a fully functional solution. At this time, there are still several components (e.g., general ledger, AFIRS, faculty workload) which do not work to support the needs of the institution and others (e.g., payroll) which the colleges do not fully understand in order to process effectively and efficiently on their own. These issues need to be corrected in order for the colleges to move forward.

Lastly, there seems to be little progress with issues related to Ciber Managed Services (MS). MS still remained unable to quickly identify and resolve system performance issues with the production environment. The production system does not meet minimum contract acceptance criteria. This continues to be unresolved at this time.


Project Status Summary

The following table summarizes the state of each of the ctcLink components and the underlying assessment categories that were reviewed.

ctcLink Assessment Scorecards

Project Area

Prior Period November

2015 Current Period

January 2016 Overall Comments

Project Management YELLOW YELLOW

The PMO organization continued to evolve with the new leadership team. o Several resources have left the team

in the past month. o Some resources are being

reassigned to other responsibilities where their knowledge can be better utilized to support the project.

o FLC College Executives still believe that the PMO, although improved with recent changes, is still not meeting their expectations and sense of urgency.

FLC Colleges continue to struggle with adoption of key application and business processes associated with the go-live. A majority of the business processes are considered Yellow.

The FLC College executives continue to provide feedback to the SBCTC Deputy Executive Director that they are frustrated with the ERP support provided to their college implementations.

The PMO continued defining the team structure and activities associated with the Wave 1 schools.

PeopleSoft Functional Solution

YELLOW YELLOW

The PeopleSoft software has now been in use for over 3 months. FLC colleges used the ctcLink solution for the Winter term in early January. ERP Support noted that calls related to processing the new term were minimal.

The project and support teams continued processing and verifying GL transactions. A timeline was


established to complete the process; however, the colleges did not believe the timeline will be met.

The PMO developed a spreadsheet showing the implementation status of each of the 242 Business Processes, what CEMLIs are associated with the specific Business Process, and what testing and training has been performed. This work remains a work in progress, with meetings at Tacoma scheduled in mid- January to review.

Technical Solution YELLOW YELLOW

The technical team has been dissolved as a distinct entity and the resources have been integrated into the remaining implementation and support teams. This move was made to put the resources closer to where they were needed.

Data conversion and management of the data validation effort is being rethought. Instead of the load part of the process really containing much of the conversion process, it will now be broken up into 4 distinct components – source, crosswalk, mapping and load. Each college will be managed separately so the efforts of one college cannot hold up all the colleges during the conversion phase.

Organizational Change Management

YELLOW YELLOW

Project transparency and communications are still a work-in- progress. Many people in the Olympia office feel that communications are improving with the new leadership; however, some people at the colleges feel that they have not seen any real change.

FLC College Presidents and Chancellors continue to express their frustrations regarding the stabilization period. They feel they are not even close to being stable and are afraid they will be left behind as the project begins to put more focus on the ctcLink Wave 1 Colleges.


Testing and Training YELLOW YELLOW

Andy Duckworth has been brought onto the team in Olympia to take charge of the training aspects of the project. He seems to have a good grasp of what is needed to build a solid training environment which can be used to support the project over time. His efforts will need to be supported with qualified staff and remain focused on building effective training materials.

Managed Services RED RED

Performance issues continue to impact the FLC Colleges’ ability to process business and these remain a focus of the Ciber application specialists and Ciber Managed services team.

Support Services YELLOW YELLOW

The support model for the FLC Colleges has changed. Instead of having daily calls to review open tickets, each pillar now has an open WebEx available daily to allow the colleges to ask questions real-time rather than entering a ticket and waiting for a response. Both sides have spoken of the success of this new model. This support approach, using WebEx sessions, is scheduled to the end of January. FLC Colleges are requesting this service to continue longer.

The ERP Support team continues to struggle with coming up to speed on the solution. The Ciber/SBCTC implementation team resources continue to be the primary knowledgebase for system functionality, which is impacting the perceived effectiveness of the ERP Support team.

LEGEND GREEN YELLOW RED

Risk Description

1) Low risks may be encountered

NO immediate action needed

2) Moderate risks may be encountered

Serious deficiency and action item recommended

3) High risks may be encountered

Needs to be escalated and can impact project effort or cost


Project Management Office (PMO)

Prior Period

YELLOW Current Period

YELLOW

Findings:

The PMO organization continued to evolve with the new leadership team. o Several resources have left the team in the past month. o Some resources are being reassigned to other responsibilities where their knowledge

can be better utilized to support the project.

The PMO continues to evaluate the on-going demands of the go-live support and the knowledge transfer issues that exist between SBCTC support, the ERP project team, and the colleges.

The PMO continued to focus the Ciber and ctcLink staff working together in Olympia on resolving open Critical and Urgent Web Help Desk tickets during December and into January.

Core project staff continue to be held responsible for ensuring the priority tickets are managed and reported on.

A Daily Report, indicating the latest status of the Web Help Desk Tickets, continued to be the primary status reporting vehicle for ticket identification and resolution.

Colleges continue to struggle with adoption of key application and business processes associated with the go-live.

A large percentage of the 242 Business Processes are considered Yellow by the FLC Colleges.

The FLC College executives continue to provide feedback to the SBCTC Deputy Executive Director that they are frustrated with the ERP support provided to their college implementations.

The PMO continued defining the team structure and activities associated with the Wave 1 schools.

The PMO began communications with the Wave 1 colleges in December to review key issues data conversion and pre-configuration activities.

The Information Technology Commission has drafted a series of recommendations to the WACTC Presidents to change the basis of the ctcLink Wave 1 scope based upon the current status of the FLC College implementations and stabilization efforts.

Risks:

Project resources remain at risk of being over-extended and understaffed.

FLC Colleges consider themselves at high risk given they do not have their Financial systems working and cannot assess where they are with their budgets.

Certain key functional areas are still at risk and have not been fully resolved by the PMO or Ciber.

Recommendations:

As previously recommended, the team has developed a document to track process status. There was a meeting scheduled with Tacoma in January to determine status of each of the processes and to determine if there are any additions or deletions to the list of processes. We


recommend the team continue to work with the FLC Colleges to help them understand the business process and not just how the system works.

Ciber and SBCTC need to continue to identify/provide additional skilled PeopleSoft functional resources that can be used to augment the current core staff now that ctcLink is being deployed.

Given the significant knowledge transfer requirement for ctcLink ERP implementations at the Wave 1 Colleges, it is recommended that an effective E-Learning program be developed and implemented to support multiple college implementations with reduced on-site consulting resources. The ctcLink Wave 1 Colleges will have benefited from having a fully functional ctcLink ERP with the majority of technical issues resolved.

SBCTC should consider strengthening the Project Management team for the ctcLink Wave 1 Phase to ensure the ctcLink Wave 1 colleges are prepared for the massive business process changes that will immediately impact their operations once the ctcLink goes live. It is important that each college have a strong and dedicated project implementation manager during the go-live and stabilization periods.


PeopleSoft Functional Solution (PS)

Prior Period


YELLOW

Findings:

The PeopleSoft software has now been in use for over 4 months. FLC colleges used the ctcLink solution for the Winter 2016 term in early January. ERP Support noted that calls related to processing the new term were minimal. This gives the impression that all was going well with Winter term enrollment, financial aid, and class scheduling; however FLC College Executives and leadership quickly gave a starkly different and less successful perspective of their experience.

The ctcLink project and support teams continued processing and verifying GL transactions. A timeline was established to complete the process by mid-January; however, the FLC Colleges did not believe the timeline will be met.

Ongoing usage of Faculty Workload application due to its design issues and complexities continued to be a problem at FLC Colleges during pay run exercises.

AFRS Reporting to the State cannot be executed until the FLC College Finance systems are fully functional and reporting data vetted.

The next Financial Aid year will need to have consultants focused on supporting the FLC Colleges.

There are 242 Business Processes that will be replaced or added by the PeopleSoft Functional Solution and associated products. The PMO developed a spreadsheet showing the implementation status of each Business Process, what CEMLIs are associated with the specific Business Process, and what testing and training has been performed.

The PMO spreadsheet, by their standard, gives the indication that the majority of Business Processes are fully implemented and otherwise Green. This is a major point of contention with the FLC College Executives given their perceived lack of ability to fully operate with the PeopleSoft software.

This work remains a work in progress using the Business Process spreadsheet, with meetings at Tacoma scheduled in January to review and assess status.

Risks:

Without knowing the readiness or alert issue status of each Business Process, the specific risks to a given Business Process could not be determined. Some of these problems continue to be evident based on the Daily Go-Live status meetings and the required activities.

Recommendations:

Consider streamlining the payroll processes and responsibilities within the capabilities and limitations of the PeopleSoft software.

Consider redesigning the Faculty Workload application software to make it more responsive and simplify for the users.


Continue working on creating and publishing the master spreadsheet with each of the 242 Business Processes showing overall readiness status, categorizing risks, indicating FLC college readiness to implement.

Keep the above spreadsheet current and use it for reporting the overall state of the FLC phase.

Using the data derived from the master spreadsheet, create a ctcLink supporting web site that incorporates all related information to the specific business process such as explanation of available reports, description of work flows, security role profiles, boundaries, special conditions, available links to training materials, and links to test scripts.


Technical Solution (Tech)

Prior Period


YELLOW

Findings:

The technical team has been dissolved as a distinct entity and the resources have been integrated into the remaining implementation and support teams. This move was made to put the resources closer to where they were needed.

Data conversion is being rethought. Instead of the load part of the process really containing much of the conversion process, it will now be broken up into distinct parts – source, crosswalk, mapping and load. Each college will be managed so one college cannot hold up all the colleges in the conversion. This rethinking should help to make conversion be more easily diagnosed for problems and thus more successful for Wave Colleges.

o A dashboard will be created for each college so they can each see independently where they stand in the process of readying their data for Go-Live.

The reporting solution is also being rethought. FLC Colleges do not feel they have the reporting capabilities needed to implement the business processes.

The initial intention was for the FLC Colleges to really be responsible for reporting but that is not working effectively. Going forward, there will be a team in Olympia dedicated to working with the colleges to develop more advanced reports, analytics and dashboards for everyone. Ad-hoc reporting using tools such as PS-Query will be done by the colleges and shared.

The Golden Gate solution has been rolled out to the colleges to provide them access to a replicated instance of the production database. This database is intended to be used to provide data to supporting systems and reporting at the colleges.

Risks:

The major technical risks remaining are:

o The ability to correctly pay employees and faculty.

o The ability to correctly process General Ledger transactions.

o The ability to correctly process Financial Aid to students.

Recommendations:

Ciber needs to continue to focus their resources on priority-based triage in supporting FLC Colleges, involving technical aspects past the original stabilization period.


Organizational Change Management & Communication (OCM)

Prior Period


YELLOW

Findings:

ctcLink Project Communications and OCM now report to Andy Duckworth. He has project staff assigned to further document the ctcLink Business Processes and assist the colleges.

Project transparency and communications are still a work in progress. Many people in the Olympia project office feel that communications is improving with the new leadership changes; however, some people at the colleges feel that they have not seen any real change.

FLC College Presidents and Chancellors continue to express their frustrations regarding the stabilization period. They feel they are not even close to being stable and are afraid they will be left behind as the project begins to put more focus on the ctcLink Wave 1 Colleges.

Wave 1 Colleges are becoming more active with the ctcLink Project Team.

The FLC colleges were stressed with their ability to staff the ctcLink system given the urgent need for knowledge transfer at the same time these processes became critical to business operations. The processes with ctcLink are much different and viewed as having many more steps. The reality is that there are probably not more steps but how they are strung together looks different to the colleges. With the lack of thorough understanding of the system at Go-Live, the colleges are still struggling to understand the steps and the need to adhere to the schedule in order to critical processing dates.

Effort continues by the PMO to report on readiness of the 242 business processes that will be replaced with the ctcLink PeopleSoft software. On a college level basis, this information should include for each business process and college the responsible SME, alternate SMEs, level of expertise and received training, participation in testing.

Although most business processes are working for the majority of transactions, the minor business case exceptions are causing problems since most of these were not tested, including testing negative values sufficiently.

Tacoma Community College intends to staff the replacement of Andy Duckworth with one or more experienced Business Analysts to work with College departments struggling with implementing PeopleSoft business processes.

FLC Colleges are concerned that they have lost credibility with their students and employees because of ctcLink implementation problems and the lack of knowledge of the changes in business processes.

Risks:

The biggest risk remains not meeting certain critical business processes with accurate data such as faculty and employee payroll, student enrollments, college financial reporting, or student financial aid.

Recommendations:

Provide better visibility of status of the core Business Processes and include the data from the colleges on their level of training and knowledge transfer of these processes, with focus on the 20 Primary Business Functions.


Business case exceptions need to be identified and documented since these exceptions will continue to cause problems with transactional processing.

Continue to provide Ciber/SBCTC and other resources to assist the FLC college staffs with most critical business processes during the post stabilization phase.

Daily communications needs to continue with the various FLC user groups, setting expectations and staff awareness.

ctcLink Wave 1 Colleges’ functional teams need to begin actively participating in Business Process knowledge transfer activities.

Open the ctcLink Sandbox to the ctcLink Wave 1 Colleges so they can begin to experiment with the PS system and plan how they will need to implement the PeopleSoft software and new business processes in their colleges.


Testing and Training (TT)

Prior Period


YELLOW

Findings:

Andy Duckworth has been brought onto the team in Olympia to take charge of the training aspects of the project. He seems to have a good grasp of what is needed to build a solid training environment which can be used to support the project over time.

o Eliminate the classroom lecture component that goes on for days.

o Make training more interactive, with short videos and online courses.

o Provide a sandbox environment that can be used by stakeholders to better understand the system.

o Establish communities of practice where users can interact with their peers from other areas to better understand how to maximize their use of the solution.

o Incorporate job aids, drill downs, screen shots, etc. in process documentation rather than providing system documentation that does not relate to how users perform their business functions.

Risks:

Training of FLC administrative staff will need to continue into the optimization phase.

Insufficient levels of pre Go-Live training for FLC staff around business processes means that they still require a higher level of on-site support from the core ctcLink team and Ciber consultants.

Recommendations:

The focus of testing needs to be selective on the critical business functions such as student enrollment, financial transactions, and payroll processing.

Continued development and refinement of Quick Reference Guides for each critical Business Process at the lowest process step needs to be high priority. The ERP functional consultants need to own and validate that each of these QRCs are accurate and easily understood.


Managed Services (MS)

Prior Period

RED Current Period

RED

Findings:

Senior leadership changes within Ciber Managed Services occurred over the last 2 months.

The ctcLink PMO has requested a detailed schedule from Managed Services for their technical work related to getting the production system updates and projected work. This still has not been received in sufficient detail.

Response time problems continue to be reported by the FLC colleges.

No reporting has been provided by Ciber Managed Services indicating technical transaction volumes and related performance criteria.

The performance of the new ctcLink production environment fails to meet minimum acceptance criteria and at this stage, is a most critical issue for the post-Go-Live stability period.

Ciber may not be meeting it SLA/Performance Targets and SBCTC is assigning the oversight role to a Director to closely monitor compliance.

Risks:

Ciber Managed Services appears to have other client demands that can impact their ability to stay focused on ctcLink priorities.

The production system, as it is now equipped and configured, does not meet minimum performance needs.

Recommendations:

Elevate the requirement to architect the production environment to meet the necessary schedule and performance targets.

Continue to monitor MS task status in support of meeting overall schedule.

Tighten down the protocols used by MS, Ciber Project, and SBCTC to report and resolve MS issues.


Support Services (SS)

Prior Period


YELLOW

Findings:

The support model for the FLC Colleges has changed. Instead of having daily calls to review open tickets, each pillar now has an open WebEx available daily to allow the colleges to ask questions real-time rather than entering a ticket and waiting for a response. Both sides have spoken of the success of this model.

o Tacoma stated that just listening to the questions and answers from Spokane has helped them as they work through issues with their use of the solution.

Ciber/SBCTC functional SME resources remained focus to fixing Critical and Urgent Web Help Desk tickets. Early January saw that more tickets were being closed than opened on a daily basis. In the third week, that trend reversed, however.

The ERP Support team continues to struggle with coming up to speed on the solution. The Ciber/SBCTC implementation team resources continue to be the primary knowledgebase for system functionality, which is impacting the perceived effectiveness of the ERP Support team.

A daily status report of Web Help Desk tickets continues to be distributed/reviewed with interested parties. The level of Urgent/Critical Tickets has continued to decrease each week; however some of these Tickets have been in the queue for many weeks/months. The definition of stabilization phase completion occurs when there are zero Urgent/Critical Tickets. Since many of the PeopleSoft business processes are yet to be used, the possibility of the appearance of new Urgent/Critical tickets remains high.

Risks:

As ERP Support Services were given increased responsibilities, there continues to be an ongoing risk that they may have assumed more work than they have current capability to deliver, especially post- stabilization period.

Recommendations:

Develop lessons learned regarding the FLC implementation efforts as these will be needed to plan support for the ctcLink Wave 1 colleges.

Continue to closely monitor the workload and effectiveness of ERP Support Services to ensure that it is staffed appropriately.

Consider adding additional resources from Ciber or ctcLink Wave 1 colleges.

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