Financial System Implementation Project Phase 1 Timeline

September 11, 2013

Since last October, the Financial System Implementation Project (FSIP) team has made substantial progress toward the project’s Phase 1 goal of implementing PeopleSoft Financials and moving the existing financial system off the mainframe. Most recently, the team has focused on converting all of the legacy financial data into PeopleSoft applications, constructing interfaces, and defining reports and workflows that will improve our business processes and support the PeopleSoft Financials implementation.

In the process of doing this work, the team has discovered that our requirements related to the data conversion, interfaces, reports, and workflows are more in quantity and complexity than originally anticipated when the project timelines were formalized last summer. In addition, a number of factors unrelated to the project, such as the conversion to biweekly pay, external audits, and the disruption with the general ledger, have impacted the availability of resources to work on the project.

Since the team is now in the process of developing a detailed production cutover plan, the project sponsors, in consultation with the Program Management Office (PMO) and Ciber, have decided now is the right time to adjust the project timeline and go-live date due to the additional scope and complexity of the project.

The PMO has worked in conjunction with the project sponsors and the Ciber team to evaluate the overall impact, and they expect the revised go-live date to be in March of 2014. Campus departments will not experience any major changes after the go-live date in Phase 1, with the exception of Accounting. While changes in scope in any project are inevitable, we are confident that we have welldefined project management processes and procedures in place, and we expect the impact of this change to be minimal. Our ultimate goal is to do the job right so that the system is fully operational and serves the campus well when it goes into production. Phase 2 of FSIP will begin immediately after Phase 1 has been successfully completed.

Lastly, we wish to thank the FSIP Executive Advisory Committee, the PMO Advisory Committee, the PMO and B&FS staffs, the Ciber team, and the many campus staff members who serve on business process teams related to the FSIP, for their diligent and thoughtful work over the past 10 months. This project is critical to the operational sustainability of our campus, and your efforts are very much appreciated.