Campus Solutions update

23 February 2010

Roadshows

At the end of 2009, the Campus Solutions project team organised and ran six roadshows for staff across LJMU.

The workshops were very well attended with around 280 staff turning up to see a demo of Campus Solutions and to learn more about the reasons why we need to move to a single student records system for all areas of the University. Feedback from participants was very positive – they appreciated the efforts the project team took to make the roadshow interesting and engaging. One participant commented:

“It’s clear a great deal of thought went into preparing the presentation. As someone who doesn't use OSS I was able to gain a good (basic) understanding of the system. I am very impressed with the functionality and security of the system and the professionalism and project management of the implementation team.”

Questions that were posed by staff at the roadshows have been recorded and used to compile a list of FAQs which are available here

Collaboration

One of the key milestones for the project team this year is the Higher Education User Group (HEUG) annual conference in Texas at the beginning of March.

This conference is the largest meeting of higher education and public sector users of Oracle applications in the world. The conference gives delegates the opportunity to network with over 3,500 other working users, discuss the applications used, unique implementations, successes, issues that have been encountered and solutions that have been found.  It is a unique and very valuable opportunity to collaborate and share ideas with others using the same products and it also gives Oracle customers from the UK the chance to talk to Oracle personnel about the future direction of the products we use.

Showing that LJMU is a leading Oracle user in the UK, a number of staff will be presenting at the conference. Two presentations relate to the CS implementation:

Firstly, Phil Wilkinson from the CS functional team is presenting on our plans for the 3 Cs functionality (communications, checklists and comments). -  functionality that is not only new to LJMU, but also quite new to Campus Solutions so there is a lot of interest in this topic.

Secondly, Rose Green from Academic Planning & Information will explain how we are planning to use Triaster and UPK (user productivity kit) to help with change management and training (building on the success of the training for the Finance and HCM systems.)

In a third presentation by LJMU, Belinda McGuiness and Matt Blandford from Finance will be providing an insight into the issues encountered when implementing Oracle Financials R12.

Next steps

The project team is now concentrating on the configuration of the system and on data migration. Once this work has been completed, staff will be invited to help to test the system and to ensure that it is configured in such a way as to meet our business requirements.   Sessions for key business users will be scheduled for the end of March.