PeopleSoft Resolution Team Meeting Minutes

Agenda Item and Presenter(s)

Discussion

Follow-up Action

Decisions

Meeting Called to Order:

3:10 pm

I. Update on PeopleSoft Projects

a) Financial Aid/SAFE Web

Got contract signed with ESI to do the mainframe for another year. We have to the PeopleSoft upgrade before we can do PeopleSoft Financial Aid.

Side note regarding PeopleSoft Upgrade:

As far as the PeopleSoft upgrade, the contract has been going around between Oracle and the district. Don’t have a final contract yet. CAO Tortorice would like to put together a steering committee for the upgrade after getting guidance from Oracle. Part of the role of the steering committee will be to identify functions that we want to use. This will be a technical upgrade, with minimum functionality changes during this go around. There will be changes to the user side, but will try to minimize them as much as possible.

There is no specific go-live date for the upgrade; the key is to figure out how long we want to test before implementation.

IT is currently in the process of recruiting for new positions. Getting ready to put together a hiring committee for the DBA job. There are about 5 applications; CAO Tortorice believes two are well qualified. Have not seen the applications for the programmer jobs.

b) Time and Labor Distribution

This project has been postponed until after the PeopleSoft upgrade.

c) PeopleSoft Data Warehouse for Financial Services

The contract has been finalized. Will start installation in a couple of weeks. There has been a couple of organizational calls and at the next call, scheduled for next week, CAO Tortorice will be asking for a list of expectations. He will also put together a steering committee for this project.

The new OBIEE will be in the new server. Data will be migrated from the old server, but users will be able to run reports from either server.

Kyu Lee and Sriram Battineni have been taking OBIEE classes; they should be able to assist with this project.

d) Electronic Workflow for Budget Transfers

Kyu Lee is the lead on this project, but he has been busy with year-end projects. He has also been taking Oracle classes in order to assist with the upgrade.

Kyu and Susan Rinne will need to meet with the business officer. This meeting has not taken place yet.

e) Electronic Personnel Action Forms

This project is underway. Bill Vorhies has led about 20 meetings with the steering group of this project to go over requirements. Target date for implementation is July 2012.

The acceptance testing will be managed in-house. Participants will be needed from Human Resources; IT will provide technical support, but this will also require end-user participation.

f) Document Management System

Finished the requirements. CAO Tortorice will meet with Bill Vorhies to prepare the specifications to be submitted to purchasing for the RFP.

Had demos from three vendors: Oracle, IBM and Highland Software. The first two areas that will be deployed are for accounts payable/contracts and transcripts. Subsequent processes can be added. It is important to have PeopleSoft compatibility.

OTHER UPDATES:

A consultant from eVerge has been assisting Educational Services and he has been very successful in troubleshooting some of the main issues. IT is recruiting to find qualified people for the new positions. CAO Tortorice suggest establishing an ongoing contract with eVerge for assistance with any last minute or emergency issues. It does not need to be for a full time consultant; it can be for 10 hours a month or as needed.

II. Report out from Committees

a) Financial Aid – Nicholes

No report.

b) Counseling – Steve Pantell/Adrienne Riley

This group meets on a regular basis. At their last meeting they passed their district priorities. Some of them might be in alignment with the PeopleSoft priorities.

The academic advising module is the most crucial priority for this group. Counselors are waiting for the ability to bring in transcripts from other schools in the country, scanned them and evaluate them into our system. We should be able to see the classes a student has taken at other institutions, evaluate those classes, and make recommendations to students based on that evaluation.

It has been discovered that the Peralta database needs to be fixed. Some classes taken within the Peralta colleges do not transfer correctly from one college to another. This is an important issue not only to the counselor, but also to Admissions and Records. Sheryl Queen and Jo Ann Phillips have done a lot of work on this. They have set up equivalencies for local colleges.

There are two elements to this process: the technical capability and the evaluations process. Scanning is just a part of the process; the bigger piece is OCR.

Jo Ann Phillips has questions about the set up and where the data will be populated. CAO Tortorice suggests Jo Ann should be part of the steering committee for this project. At the beginning the set-up will be generic, because it will not be used for Admissions & Records only, but for other departments.

The goal is to have the RFP by July 2012 and go out to bid; project should get started in August 2012. First projects will be for General Services, Accounts Payable, and contracts. Scanning for transcripts will kick off in January 2013.

VC Budd would like to have more programming hours for this project. She suggests a meeting with Minh, Sheryl, and Jo Ann. At this point Jo Ann believes that more clean up needs to be done in the functionality side before it can be passed to the technical side. Sheryl would like to wait until after the Academic Advisement class scheduled for May 14, 2012.

Adrienne Riley would like PRT to consider moving some of the issues on the PRT Issues log to align them with the counseling priorities. The counseling group has been working closely with Admissions & Records in some of these issues.

c) Human Resources – Betts

The first four meeting for the Electronic Personnel Action Forms (EPAF) project, included people from the colleges, HR, and budget/finance. This was done in order to include everyone that could offer input.

The HR/Payroll/Benefits group has not been meeting regularly.

HR is currently recruiting for new college and district positions. The district positions have been established at higher rates in order to attract qualified candidates, but still having challenges with recruitment for these positions. There is a lot of competition with high tech companies in the bay area.

Need to do the PeopleSoft upgrade before working on the leave absence project. There was one staff person in HR doing this process manually, but he has been moved to payroll. This may cause a lot of delays in this process.

d) Library – (Need to find someone to report out)

All the purchases to finish the library upgrade have been made. This was done with approved Measure A funds.

A request from the librarians went to PBC for instructional materials and a budget line has been set up. Silvia Cortez in IT assists the librarians to pay invoices for library subscriptions and databases out of this budget line.

e) Matriculation – Ng (Sheryl Queen reported)

Meetings for this group have been sporadic. There has not been anything crucial, but there is a need to reconnect and work on issues that were left from last academic year.

As Peralta increases distance education, there is a need to offer students services for this population and there is no other committee in Peralta that addresses issues like this.

VC Budd suggests herself and AVC Orkin to assist with this committee.

f) Schedulers – Queen

Jesus Chanlatte is assisting with some issues that the schedulers have encounter. Found a few glitches in the way some courses are being entered.

g) Student Finance – Willis (Dominique Benavides reported)

This group has not met in a few months, but any student finance issues are being entered into FootPrints.

Having some issues with AC Transit and contract education students.

h) Student Services – Gravenberg

No report.

i) Budget/Finance – Rinne/Gerhard

A lot of projects have been updated. At the moment they are working on ProRata and Finance will need to meet with the college schedulers to evaluate how class dates are being entered in the system. Most of the issues were found at Alameda and Laney.

Other projects include fiscal year end and the implementation of BI to generate reports needed at the end of the fiscal year.

The Payroll Department is out in training all this week. During the past months, the staff from Finance has taken a lot of the PS classes in preparation for the upgrade.

j) Admissions and Records – Brown-Willis (AVC Orkin reported)

Students’ email account will now be shown in the student screen and faculty rosters.

AVC Orkin submitted a FootPrints ticket this morning regarding the student login/password set-up and the ability for students to reset their passwords. This issue has been assigned to Jesus Chanlatte.

Jo Ann Phillips mentioned that students will now be able to input their email and choose a prefer email in the splash screen. Prefer email is the one that will show in all rosters.

Admissions & Records is in the process of improving notifications to students about activating their student email after they finish CCCApply.

Kit Hui has done a report of all the student emails that have been activated (Fall to Fall comparison).

Karolyn van Putten asked for a status report on the roll book. VC Budd explained that some progress was made, but need to wait for the PS upgrade.

k) Institutional Effectiveness/BI Tool – Orkin

Sriram Battineni has been in training to get ready for the upgrade and to implement new tools. Sriram is also writing code that can count FTES the same as MIS.

Need to identify potential users for the extra 50 licenses that have been purchased for BI and need to look at people who have left the district and still have a license assign to them.

l) Instructional Faculty – Alexander (VC Budd reported)

Alexis Alexander has completed her Staff Development assignment and a new person will be select for the next period.

Alexis did a great job at collecting staff development hours for faculty. Need to get the source code for the application that was created to keep track of this.

Minh Lam mentioned that the code was given to Ram and Gopaal, but the there are problems with that code.

III. Review of Issues Log

• Personnel Action Request Form: This is being worked on (see Electronic Personal Action Forms under Item I).

• SARS/PASSPORT Interface: Completed.

• Rollbooks: There was a temporary solution to this issue, but need to add a new ticket for a permanent fix

• Reports: It is suggested to break it more issue by issues.

• Milestones and Milestone ID Tracking: Jesus Chanlatte has been assigned to this and he is currently working on these issues.

• PASSPORT Login/Reset Issues: AVC Orkin put a FootPrint ticket for this issue today.

• GE Designation Notes: Functional issue.

• “Honor Roll”: Functional issue in PeopleSoft

• Class Code & Instruction Names: Looking at a rewrite. Code could be written in-house.

• CCCAply Non-HS Status: Gopaal might be looking at this issue. Minh will follow with Gopaal.

• PS System Delay: Performance needs to be monitored in an ongoing manner. This issue can be removed from the list.

• BTR & Requisitions: Would like a new feature that shows current balance on the screen.

• Payroll Information: This issue will be discussed at the next Business Managers Meeting

• Warehouse Orders: Need to work on existing business process.

• PAFs and LARs need to be online: These issues need to be removed from the log.

• Roster Due Dates & Drop Link Missing: Issue has been resolved and needs to be removed from the list.

• Positive Attendance: Jo Ann Phillips has been working on this, but right now this is a manual process. Minh suggests discussing with SARS on how the data is being duplicated.

• Roster Submit Button: Sheryl Queen suggests sending a notice once the rosters have been submitted. Need to update the request for this issue.

• Campus Email Address: This is being worked on. Issue needs to be removed from log.

• Term Roll Over: Issue needs to be removed from list.

• Wait List Process: This has been resolved. Issue needs to be removed from the list.

• COMPASS: This is a programming issue.

• For a couple of pieces that interact with each other like Student Fees, Academic, Special Projects CAO Tortorice suggests doing a FootPrints ticket for JoAnn, Dominique, and Minh to work together.

IV. Other

Connie Willis brought up the issue of Malware and the FBI that has been reported in the news. CAO Tortorice replied that the IT Department sends reminders on a weekly basis and we try to stay on top of security issues.

Connie also had questions regarding the computer refresh process. Should questions be addressed to IT or General Services? CAO Tortorice has met with the ENG group to develop specifications for desktops and laptops for PCs and Macs. Purchasing will send out to bid in order to purchase in bulk and get maintenance as part of the contract with the vendor.

The cutoff date for Measure A purchases is May 11. This is done in order to ensure delivery of goods by June 30. If the colleges are looking at a massive purchase, some items might not get delivered by the deadline and this is ok as long as the colleges coordinate with Finance.

Adjournment:

4:45pm

Next meeting:

Monday, May 21, 2012, 3:00 pm – 5:00pm

District Office Board Room