Project Planning

Academe Solutions believes the most effective approach for implementing PeopleSoft® Campus Solutions is to select a target “go-live” term that coincides with the beginning of a new Academic Year. Constructing your project plan and implementation schedule based on a term that begins a new Academic Year allows you to move required system components into production in incremental phases, replicating time periods, academic calendars and business processes that are unique to your institution’s Academic Year processing cycles and familiar to your user community. In essence, all activities associated with the selected Academic Year will be performed in PeopleSoft® Campus Solutions, beginning with the first processing event of the Academic Year.

When considering options for developing a project plan and implementation schedule, we recommend beginning by researching and analyzing the time periods, academic calendars and business processes that are associated with the Academic Year processing cycle at your institution. The following components should be considered:

• Term system (semester, quarter, clock hours, etc.)

• New and continuing student mix (transfer, first time freshmen, re-entry)

• Nature of institution and programs (residential, commuter, cosmopolitan, undergraduate and graduate programs, continuing education programs, degrees)

• Organization of all colleges, schools, academic programs and departments

• Application deadlines and timing of admission decisions

• Financial Aid (application deadlines, institutional aid, federal grants, direct lending, guaranteed loans, timing of notifications)

• Registration: pre-registration, appointments, mode of delivery (voice response, web), enrollment limits (rate of work), grade basis change, pass fail selection options, last day to add/drop, last day to drop with no grade penalty, last day to drop with W, last day to withdraw from institution

• Financial Accounts: Application, Deposit and other miscellaneous fees and deadlines associated with Admissions processing cycles, Term Bill deadline dates, Refund deadlines, policies and percentages for drops, cancellations and withdrawals

• Grading (system of grading, final examinations, grade submission deadlines, method of handling grade rosters, how grades are distributed to students)

• Graduation and Degrees (application deadlines, commencement dates, audit of academic requirements)

Using these processing events and dates, we can construct an implementation plan that identifies key implementation outcomes and dependencies required in PeopleSoft® Campus Solutions to support the Academic Year processing events. The implementation outcomes help to identify incremental components and dependencies of the system that must be fully developed, tested and moved to production in order to support processing cycles for the selected Academic Year. Implementation outcomes are supported and achieved through completion of detailed, integrated and clearly defined implementation steps and table load sequences.

Not only can analyzing Academic Year milestones assist with project approach, planning and scheduling, the information contained in these milestones begins to provide key definitions and conditions for required components of the Academic Structure. For example, milestones such as Last Day for Add or Drop are Time Periods in PeopleSoft® Campus Solutions. Time Periods are linked to Terms and Sessions and are associated with specific dates within each Term. These Time Periods can be used to dynamically define Security Access timeframes for Enrollment Functions such as Adds, Drops, and Grade Changes each Term. The Last Day to Withdraw Without Penalty is also another good example of how these milestones can play a critical role in the initial definition of the Academic Structure. This milestone can be used as a Time Period, as well as defining the Withdraw Without Penalty Deadline Date on the Academic Calendar.