Tuesday, October 9, 2001

A New Approach to PeopleSoft Installations Sets Limits on Time and Costs By FLORENCE OLSEN Get key administration officials who are involved in special software projects away from the campus and distractions. Keep them focused for weeks on end. Use the time to collaborate in ways that aren't possible under ordinary circumstances. Officials of Lee College, in Texas, and the University of Akron, in Ohio, say that such rigor, and more, is required to succeed at installing integrated administrative-information systems. Both institutions finished big installations of systems from PeopleSoft Inc. last month -- on time and on budget, even though such efforts typically take several years to complete and often cost more than expected. "We have a lot of tired people," says Dennis R. Topper, the dean of administrative services at Lee. "It was tough." Lee and Akron are among the first colleges to install student-information systems using new project-management procedures and software developed by PeopleSoft. The procedures, which put the installations on fixed budgets with fixed deadlines, represent a new approach to a difficult process that in the past has proved troublesome for colleges. Well-publicized problems in getting PeopleSoft student systems set up properly at Cleveland State University in 1999 and 2000 highlighted the need for better installation guidelines for all kinds of big software packages from the companies that create them, says Thomas A. Gaylord, vice president and chief information officer for information and instructional technologies, libraries, and institutional planning at Akron. The Lee and Akron projects were unusual in that both institutions used what PeopleSoft calls a laboratory method for planning, configuring, and installing the company's complex administrative software. Institutions ship their own server hardware to one of PeopleSoft's six laboratories in North America, and then college officials spend up to five weeks at the lab with PeopleSoft consultants who help them set up and test their new systems. "It gives us and them the opportunity just to focus on the task at hand," says Christopher Feeley, the vice president and managing director of PeopleSoft global services for education and government. Mr. Feeley says the work is done on a fixed schedule and for a fixed price that depends on such factors as the size of the institution, the number of other systems that need to exchange information with the PeopleSoft systems, and the qualifications of the institution's technical-staff members. Lee College, a two-year public college in Baytown, Tex., with 6,000 students, signed a $1-million administrative-systems contract with PeopleSoft on June 29, 2000. The 10-month clock for the fixed schedule began running July 17, when Lee officials gathered at a PeopleSoft lab in Chicago. On January 1, 2001, the college began paying its bills using the general-ledger, accounts-payable, and purchasing functions in PeopleSoft Financials. On the same day, the college switched its human-resources, benefit, and payroll operations to PeopleSoft HRMS. By May 14, Lee was processing student records with the PeopleSoft Student Administration system. The college decided to wait until August 1 to start processing financial-aid information with the new system. "Student Administration is an order of magnitude more difficult to implement than Financials and HRMS," says Mr. Topper, the dean of administrative services. The University of Akron, which agreed on a 12-month installation schedule, used the same PeopleSoft lab in Chicago to set up the Student Administration and Financials software for its 23,000-student main campus. But in Akron's case, the price of new administrative software and consulting services was only a small part of a $13.5-million, three-year infrastructure upgrade necessary to handle the PeopleSoft system. The project included nearly $6-million in spending on new hardware and related software. Upgrading the technology infrastructure at Akron to handle the new software required tripling the processing power of its servers, buying faster databases and faster desktop computers, and creating bigger networks -- "all the possible things that might contribute" to users' satisfaction, says Mr. Gaylord, the vice president for information technology. "Almost a third went for staffing," including more than $1.5-million for additional administrative-staff positions, Mr. Gaylord says. "As we added the stress of change, we wanted to make sure they were at least a little better able to handle that." In addition, $250,000 was spent on software training, and more than $1-million to get technical-staff members "up to a market-salary midpoint," Mr. Gaylord says. University employees are often lured away by higher salaries elsewhere once they learn the intricacies of PeopleSoft systems, he adds. Another factor in Akron's success, says Mr. Gaylord, was the use of rigorous procedures for managing the project. He says that he is sold on the value of what he calls a "structured methodology" for setting up PeopleSoft's administrative systems, and adds that he plans to use it for all future information-technology projects. He has even hired a full-time project manager to teach all of his technology managers how to manage using those same rigorous procedures. Similar procedures are being used by California State University System officials. Cal State, which is installing PeopleSoft administrative software on 23 campuses, has not brought its servers into a PeopleSoft laboratory to be configured, nor has it used the company's project-management procedures. But the university system has used its own rigorous project-management procedures and used the chancellor's office as a laboratory of sorts, says Hilary J. Baker, senior director for Common Management Systems at Cal State. "That approach is working well," she adds. Background article from The Chronicle: 2 Colleges Will Test New PeopleSoft Technique for Managing Its Software (7/28/2000) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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