Collaboration powers Concordia’s new Student Information System
In March 2013, more than 30 university staff members were seconded from their everyday jobs to work at Concordia’s Montefiore building.
Their mission? To ready the new Student Information System (SIS) for its online release in January 2015: a large-scale institutional project that will improve access to vital services and information for faculty, staff and students.
How big is the SIS?
Concordia’s SIS supports virtually all key business functions and processes across the university, including recruitment, admissions, enrolment, academic advising, registration, course and exam scheduling, student accounts, graduation, government reporting for funding purposes, and invoicing.
Based on a packaged software platform from Oracle called PeopleSoft Campus Solutions — currently used at more than 25 educational institutions across Canada — the new SIS will replace an aging in-house system that no longer meets the university’s expanding needs.
Once implemented, it will completely change the online experience and interactive relationship that students have with the university while also offering improved, centralized access to key information for faculty and staff.
A view from the front line
For Uchenna Mgbemena, SIS change management lead, the sheer scope of the project and the significant impact the new system will have on everyday activities pose a daunting but exciting challenge.
“This implementation is large, and it impacts all users of the current SIS,” says Mgbemena, who has been working closely with all areas of the user community to make sure the new SIS is configured to their needs. “We want to help them transition to the new system with confidence and the least disruption possible. A comprehensive training program is currently in development for rollout this fall. ”
The new system will result in many benefits, including process efficiencies, but for Concordia’s technical team, ease of maintenance and the ability to implement off-the-shelf improvements quickly and easily are key.
“It’s a big change from what we have now,” says Tim Ni, the SIS project’s technical lead. “Before, we were developing and maintaining an in-house system. From back end to front, it was all custom work. With the PeopleSoft solution, a lot is already built, and we just have to refine it to fit Concordia's needs.”
To address those needs, staff members who work in the new system’s six functional areas — along with technical, change management and consulting resources — joined the Montefiore team to input detailed specifications. The six areas include academic advising, admissions, campus community, financial aid, student financials and student records.
With the support of Deloitte systems integration consultants, the SIS team aims to have the new system in live operation by January 2015, within 22 months of the project’s start date.
As the project’s functional lead, Jean-François Bourgault cites Concordia’s decision to bring interdisciplinary resources together under one roof as a key factor in keeping the tight implementation timeline on track.
“Having the project’s entire frontline staff — a large group focused on making the new system work — in one place has enabled us to resolve challenges quickly and effectively,” he says.
Ni agrees. “Being close to the functional team has been a huge boon to us. Any time something is unclear, we just run downstairs to hash out the issues. Also, meetings are all held here, so there's not a lot of time wasted travelling across campuses.”
Testing: a milestone is reached
A year into the project, everything is running smoothly and four of the six modules of the new SIS are already in testing mode.
“We’ve started testing scenarios for the admissions, student records, student financials and campus community modules — that means seeing how these components will actually be used,” Bourgault says.
“The project teams are now beginning to see the results of all the effort they've put into this over the past year, and reaching that milestone is really exciting.”
For Ni’s team of developers, the size of this endeavour sets it apart from other large-scale projects. “Typically, you might have a one-month or two-month project,” he says. “But this one is a year-and-a-half long, and we’re being trained on the system as we go! I’m very pleased with how my team has handled it.”
One reason for the smooth progress is that Deloitte’s integration experts are working closely with Concordia’s technical team to ensure a detailed systems knowledge transfer will be complete once the project ends.
“Most of them have five or 10 years’ experience working with PeopleSoft, and they’re sitting with our developers, who are new to it,” Ni says. “By launch time, I’m confident that our developers will have the knowledge to sustain the system for the next 10 or 20 years.”
Additional benefits of the discovery phase
As Bourgault explains, another benefit of the project’s first phase was the wealth of institutional knowledge that poured in from a range of sectors. These functional areas have been using a multitude of different systems and applications for many years.
“As we've gone through this process, we've really learned how Concordia functions as an institution,” he says. “We're going to be able to carry that forward in the system, and also have everything documented as we consolidate for process efficiencies.”
Ultimately, the goal of the new SIS is to provide a better service to students, faculty and staff. Bourgault has no doubt that it will deliver.
“Students are going to have access to more features and self-service capabilities, while faculty and staff will find essential information they need in one centralized location, enabling them to proactively support student success,” he says. “Overall, the new SIS will create an improved working and learning environment at Concordia.”
About the SIS Renewal Project
The business case for implementing a new Student Information System at Concordia was approved by the university’s Board of Governors in November 2012.
Deloitte Consulting LLP was hired as the integration partner after a rigorous bidding process, and based on its successful track record of implementing the chosen system at other North American universities.
A dedicated SIS hub will soon be live on Cspace to help faculty and staff stay up-to-date on project progress and key milestones. Relevant information for students will be posted on the Student Hub at Concordia.ca at the appropriate time.