We want to thank our CUNYfirst Campus Teams and acknowledge the great teamwork that led to the timely delivery of our new Organizational Readiness Checklist status information by the April 15^th due date.  These checklists serve as a useful tool for your Campus Teams to monitor progress in terms of completing organizational readiness activities and allowing structure for reporting back issues or questions that need to be addressed to complete the activities by the due dates. What we saw in the response to this task is an increase in communications among team members across pillars that we hope will lead to greater understanding of the Project and all our roles to lead to its success.  Thank you again.

General Ledger – Training the Trainers Begins

Our first sessions of Training began this week as we met with 40 of our colleagues from around the university who will train users in the General Ledger processes.  We opened our new Borough Training Centers at Brooklyn College (photos below) and City College as our trainers learned presentation skills, classroom management and conflict resolution.  They will return on April 28^th to begin learning the content of the classes they will teach for the end users of the new CUNY General Ledger.  Our thanks to David Arnow at Brooklyn College and Tom Sabia at City College who oversaw the set-up and technology needs for our new learning laboratories.

General Ledger – Testing Continues

Systems Integration Testing continues on the new General Ledger, making sure it integrates with current CUNY systems.  The next set of testing for the General Ledger will be User Acceptance Testing (UAT), where subject matter experts, Finance Liaisons as well as some end users will test the system with real CUNY data to test its capabilities in regular and high user load environments.

General Ledger – Chart of Accounts

Our Finance Team has “frozen” the new CUNY Chart of Accounts for one month to allow our finance teams working on the General Ledger to do their work in an environment that is stable and allows us to test what has been built against our upcoming work.  It also gives our Process Owner’s Representative, Christina Seglem, the University Assistant Controller time to examine and give her input on our currently configured Chart.

Accounts Payable/Procurement/Expenses Kickoff

On April 23, we will kick-off the next of our CUNYfirst Finance implementations.  We now are ready to embark on the design and development of the Accounts Payable (AP), Purchasing (PO) and Expense (Exp) modules of CUNYfirst.  The meeting will provide a more detailed explanation of the vision, goals and objectives of the Procurement effort, as well as, discuss the participation levels required in meeting the timeline for this work.

New Team Members – Accounts Payable, Purchasing

We welcome to the CUNYfirst Core Team Nancy Cruz (nancy.cruz@mail.cuny.edu) cwho omes to us from the City of New York.  Her responsibility is the Accounts Payable processes.  Overseeing Purchasing is Joanne Sagherian (joanne.sagherian@mail.cuny.edu).  Joanne comes to the Project from Kingsborough Community College.

Next Steps – Human Resources and Student Administration

We will soon begin scheduling our next round of meetings for our Human Resources and Student Administration work.  In the past, our fit/gap sessions were mostly an opportunity for subject matter experts to talk about processes in a theoretical environment.  When we begin our new sessions, we have new criteria that we believe will lead to a quicker understanding of our processes and meeting our challenges to create our best systems.  For these sessions we will request the most appropriate subject matter experts for the specific process, give them experience in working with a PeopleSoft prototype during those meetings to allow them to have the best information to present their opinions.  We believe this change will allow for decisions to be made in a more collaborative environment and will allow a connection with those whose work integrates with that particular process. We look forward to a high level of engagement from our campuses.

CUNYfirst Community Survey

Approximately 6,000 people from around the university received an email from our Project Sponsor, Executive Vice President Allan Dobrin, introducing them to the 2008 CUNYfirst Community Survey.  This is the second assessment that will gather ideas and opinions about CUNYfirst.  The survey will be sent out from the Baruch Survey Research Unit beginning April 21 in several waves.  Responses will be gathered by May 1. All individual responses will be kept confidential. 

System Integration Testing began this week with our Finance Community to see how the General Ledger system operates in an environment that includes the various systems that feed information to it.  To understand the testing that each process will face, I am attaching a CUNYfirst Focus sheet in this email to explain the testing plan for General Ledger and the Project at large.  The next phase of testing the General Ledger is User Acceptance Testing where the processes are pushed to the limits to ensure it meets CUNY standards.

General Ledger – Training the Trainers

We will begin Training the Trainers for General Ledger next week, with a two-day course.  On Monday and Tuesday, trainers identified for colleges in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island will meet at the Brooklyn Borough Training Center for the presentation workshop.  Wednesday and Thursday, trainers from Manhattan and the Bronx will participate in the same instruction at the Manhattan Borough Training Center at City College.  The focus next week will be to give them skills to manage the learning environment and facilitate the training for our end users, which begins in May.

Project Management/Change Management – General Ledger

The General Ledger Organizational Readiness Checklist was developed from the project plan for campus based activities, with input from the various CUNYfirst Project Teams (Finance Pillar, Security, Technical Readiness, Data Conversion, Testing, etc.).  The objective is  to prepare to "Go-Live" with the General Ledger in July.  These activities will be conducted by the Campus Teams with instructions being given by the Core CUNYfirst Project Team.  Specific Campus Team responsibilities are:    

• The Campus Team Project Management Liaison will coordinate organizational readiness activities at the campus, working with the Campus Team members
• The Campus Team Change Management Liaison will monitor the progress of completing the organizational readiness activities on campus, working with the Campus Team Project Management Liaison to identify those activities that need further attention
• The Campus Team Members (e.g., Security Liaison, Technical Readiness Liaison, Finance Pillar Lead, etc.) will execute and complete the organizational readiness activities by the due dates. If tasks on the Checklist are unclear, Campus Team members should get in touch with their respective CUNYfirst Project team contact
• It is important for the Campus Teams to meet as needed to communicate progress on organizational readiness activities.  The Campus Team Change Management Liaison will monitor the completion of the activities on the Checklist, and will forward progress to the CUNYfirst Project Team.  Campus organizational readiness success will be measured by the completion of the activities by the due dates.

Next Week and Beyond

The CUNYfirst Steering Committee will meet Wednesday here at West 57^th.  They receive an update on Project Status and see a demonstration of the Enterprise Learning Management (ELM) system from Training Manager Adante Harvey.  ELM will manage our learning and training activities for the Project.  It is important to note that our ELM system went live April 9.  Thanks to everyone, especially our campus experts who tested and helped put this system into production

On April 16, the Finance Liaisons will meet at West 41^st.  On their agenda is working with their campus Project Liaison to understand their work for the GL Readiness Checklist, an update on Training, updates on testing (including User Acceptance Training), reporting and the current status of the Chart of Accounts.

We are working with the Baruch Survey Unit to finalize the upcoming CUNYfirst Community Survey about the Project.  That survey will be sent out to about 7,000 recipients at the end of April

SharePoint and Project Graphics/Templates

The Project Calendar is on our SharePoint site – https://firstsharepoint.cuny.edu.  Access right now is extended to Campus Executives, Project, Change Management and Communications Liaisons.  All liaisons will have access by the end of April.

The new CUNYfirst style guide is written to accompany the new Project Graphics package.  That guide is available on the SharePoint site or from the Communications Team.

The CUNYfirst Training team announced both types of General Ledger training.  The first, Train the Trainer learning, will begin April 14.  In those sessions, campus participants will learn how to become effective trainers of end users.  Skills include: Presentation and delivery skills, classroom and group facilitation and mediation and conflict management.  In the second phase participants will be provided with GL content skills - how to teach others to work with CUNYfirst applications.  These sessions begins April 28 and concludes May 6.

The second end-user training for those who will directly use CUNYfirst General Ledger processes will begin May 19 with an orientation about CUNYfirst.  The end user training schedule is listed below.

All training will be conducted at our Borough Training Centers at Brooklyn College, City College, Hostos Community College and Queens College.  Our Training Manager Adante Harvey will contact Train the Trainer candidates and end users directly about their learning activities.  Trainers and end-users will be reminded to work with supervisors to plan the time end users will be at training.

General Ledger Testing

Next week, our Finance Liaisons will take part in Systems Integration Testing for the General Ledger processes.  This involves testing the individual applications within the General Ledger module.  This testing will also see how the GL interacts with legacy systems that will need to feed information into our Chart of Account fields and provide the reports necessary for the business operations for CUNY and our campuses.  Testing reduces risk and uncertainty.

Our objectives for testing are:

• Assess quality of all elements of software modules
• Validate that system meets CUNY’s rigorous requirements
• Validate that technical performance is in accordance with CUNY business requirements and performance management
• Identify and correct errors prior to production operations

Those involved in this testing will try their best to challenge the applications to ensure its reliability when CUNYfirst is launched in July.

Help/Support Desk – User Acceptance Testing

User acceptance training for our Help/Support system took place this week.  We want to thank those from our campuses that tested the system for its readiness to support our General Ledger users when GL goes live this summer.

Project Management/Change Management- General Ledger

Project Management and Change Management Liaisons met Tuesday to learn the technical readiness needs for the project and who on our campuses is leading those efforts.  The meeting also served as an introduction to the Organizational Readiness tasks that will serve as the key indicator of campus readiness to use GL in the areas of interfaces, shadow systems, reporting, testing, training, end-user support, communications and security.  This checklist will provide direction to the campuses about how to work with the CUNYfirst Core Team to monitor activity and provide support needed as we work toward Go-Live.

Up Next

Coming up this week we’ll continue our work on the student side and understanding application security.  This is where we ensure that staff with specific functions can access the processes necessary to do their work, ensuring proper security protocol throughout the system.  Tuesday, those involved in managing our Student Records will take part in those discussions.

Next Friday, Campus Executives will meet.

SharePoint and Project Graphics/Templates

The Project Calendar is on our SharePoint site – https://firstsharepoint.cuny.edu.  Access right now is limited to Campus Executives, Project and Communications Liaisons.  All liaisons will have access by the end of April.

A new style guide is written to accompany the new Project Graphics package.  That guide is being sent to the Communication Liaisons who can make it available to members of their team.  It is also available on the SharePoint site.