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The University of Wisconsin-Madison: Modernizing a Campus by Committee
8/22/2003
For the past several years, we at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have managed a significant IT implementation called ISIS—the Integrated Student Information System. In creating this project, we aimed to modernize all the student operations on campus, from admissions, to enrollment, to student financial processes. After an intense search process, we selected PeopleSoft’s Student Administration application. Our original implementation took place in 1998, and in August 2002, we completed a successful upgrade to PeopleSoft 8, a pure Internet solution that offers real-time access to academic and administrative information through any Web browser.
Along this road to IT transformation, we learned important lessons about project
management and implementation success. Today, we are reaping the benefits of
Student Administration, delivering improved service to our students, faculty
and staff.
Decisions that touch
virtually every member of a university community should not be made in a vacuum—or
within an IT department alone.
We credit our successful ISIS implementation to our development of a partnership
approach to project management. As we implemented, we recognized that our new
technology would overhaul campus processes that had been in place at Madison
for years. It became clear that threatening people’s comfort zones on
such a scale would be a significant exercise in change management, so we worked
to involve the end user in the process.
Our initial attempts met expectations with only qualified success. While the
technical implementation was successful, the impression it made on campus was
not entirely glowing. Therefore, we put in place a revised and much more robust
process to get additional input from a wider range of “voices” on
campus. Decisions that touch virtually every member of a university community
should not be made in a vacuum—or within an IT department alone.
Having built upon this partnership concept, we are pleased to share a well-tested
and fine-tuned best practice that we consider our “formula for implementation
success.”
1. Listen to End Users
Understand what pains end users, and offer them a meaningful role in the implementation
process. We assembled a core upgrade team to manage the implementation of PeopleSoft
8. But our organizational chart did not stop with that one entity. Our core
committee created additional teams, each assigned to study a specific module
of the new PeopleSoft software.
For example, we assembled a “Student Records Team,” a “Financial
Aid Team” and an “Admissions Team,” among others. As we built
each team, we ensured that membership included representatives from both the
IT side, but more importantly, from the functional, end-user side. The Student
Records Team, for instance, was managed by an assistant registrar as opposed
to an IT administrator.
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