Harvard Student Information System Implementation Update

Harvard IT Summit

June 5, 2014

Speaker Introduction

• Jason Shaffner | @jasonshaffner | jason_shaffner@harvard.edu

– Managing Director, Student Information System Program

– Six years at Harvard in FAD and HUIT

– Formerly led transformative information technology projects at

University of Arizona, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins

University, and the University of Puerto Rico, among others

– Harvard College / Pforzheimer House / Social Studies Alumnus

2

Agenda

• Background

– Why?

– What?

– When?

• Implementation Fun Facts

• Key Success Factors

– Agile

– Student / Faculty Experience

– Cloud

– Business Intelligence

– Training and Change Management

• Q&A

3

Background

Why are we implementing a Common SIS?

• Motivated by several factors:

– Technical Debt: Inflexible, aging, and deficient systems at

several schools and for University-wide services.

– Service Deficiencies: Inefficient, paper-intensive services poorly

suited for expectations of faculty, students, and departments.

– Support for “One Harvard” Vision: Make it easier for students

and faculty to engage in cross-school teaching and learning.

• Steering Committee convened in 2012:

– More than 300 participants across all schools.

– Recommended moving ahead ASAP with FAS and Student

Financial Services, with other schools to join in later years.

– No mandate for all schools to join, but common expectation to

achieve “seamless interoperation” across all by the end. 5

Why are we implementing a Common SIS?

6

Everyone

• Consistent experience across schools, programs, disciplines

• Modern, intuitive, and consistent look-and-feel

• Fewer logins

• Online / mobile self-service

Faculty & Advisors

• One-stop access to vital info about courses and advisees

• Authoritative class rosters

• Simplified grade entry

• Tracking non-course milestones and research projects

Students

• Online course enrollment and add/drop

• Multi-year planning tools

• “What-if” scenarios and real-time validation against degree requirements

• Automated notification of grades, holds, etc., via email or text

Departments

• Flexible reporting, analysis, and communications tools

• Reduced reliance on IT or need for “shadow” databases

• Automation of manually intensive tasks such as concentration GPA

• New opportunities for course planning and forecasting

New Student Information System = One Piece of the Puzzle

7

The intersection between the New SIS and the New Teaching & Learning platform is

especially relevant to faculty and students and the teams are working together to

optimize the user experience across these platforms.

School

Applications

Teaching & Learning

Technologies

New Student Information

System

Identity & Access

Management

Successor

to iSites

Successor to:

FAS

• HERS1 / HERS2

• Advising Portal

• Grading Portal

• Course Planner

• Study Card

• my.harvard

• …and more

HDS

• PowerCampus

Wave 2 decision

forthcoming…

What are we implementing?

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Business Functions

• Biographic / Demographic Info

• Course Catalog and Schedule

• Student Receivables

• Academic Advising

• Student Enrollments

• Program and Course Requirements

• Grading & Evaluation (Integration with

Learning Management)

• Academic Statistics & Transcripts

• Graduation Processing

• Data Analysis & Reporting

Vision

Adopt a modern, secure, flexible, and intuitive student information technology

platform that provides an excellent user experience, supports unique requirements

of the schools, and facilitates access to integrated student and course data.

Technology

• Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions

• Core Transaction Modules

• Student Administration Integration

Pack (SAIP) – LTI-compliant APIs

• PeopleTools core technology

• PeopleSoft Interaction Hub

• User interface enhancement

• Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE)

• BI Foundation Suite

• Student Information Analytics (SIA)

• Exalytics In-Memory BI Machine

• Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK)

• Context-sensitive help

• Online simulations

• Mobile apps TBD

When do we go-live?

9

November 2014 Student Financials (All Schools)

September 2015

• Harvard College

• Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

• School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

• Harvard Divinity School

Summer 2016 Wave 2 Schools

(schools to be known by June 30, 2014!)

Winter 2016 Seamless Inter-Operation for All Schools

Implementation Facts

From Summit (2013) to Summit (2014)

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June 6, 2013 June 5, 2014 What?

1 23 Full-time

Harvard staff…

? 2 Arrow Street Our Location

1 9 Total PeopleSoft and

OBIEE Instances

0 3 Amazon Web Services

Instances

0 10 Scrum or Kanban

Teams

Harvard’s Academic Structure

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• Campus Solutions is organized around several key concepts:

– Institution: We are configured as a single institution

– Career: At Harvard, roughly equivalent to “school” (but not quite)

– Program: At Harvard, roughly equivalent to “degree”

– Plan: Roughly equivalent to “concentration” or “major”

– Sub-Plan: Roughly equivalent to “track” or “specialty”

• We started designing the HU Academic Structure one year ago and

we are finally on the edge of being done!

• School with the most “Plan” codes? Harvard College (337)

• School with the most “Sub-Plan” codes? Public Health (333)

• Unique “Plan” codes across Harvard? 1,505 (and counting…)

“Academic Structure” in Campus Solutions defines the overall structure of the

university, including degrees, programs, and concentrations… We knew that

Harvard was a complicated place, but…. Wow!

ATS and SIS Project Summary

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• One of the key challenges for the SIS Program Team and the HUIT Administrative

Technology (ATS) team is to figure out the impact of the implementation on the

existing portfolio of FAS applications.

1. Applications: Analyzing the current portfolio, conducting high-level or in-depth fit-gap analyses,

and determining the future direction for each system in the portfolio.

2. Data Flow: Many applications in the “Do Not Retire” category rely upon data that will be stored

in the new Campus Solutions database; we are working to identify options for integration based

on requirements of data freshness, read-only vs. read-write, and other characteristics.

3. Interfaces: There are many system-to-system interfaces that have to be built and tested prior to

the go-live dates in 2015…

4. Retirement / Decommission Plan: Define user access requirements post go-live, data

archiving requirements (if applicable), timeline for decommission and removal from server(s).

Key Success Initiatives

Why Agile?

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• Overcome challenges of ambiguous scope.

• Provide optimal support for the phasing plan for this program.

• Establish agile foundation for ongoing iterations beyond go-live.

• Best fit for business intelligence and user experience deliverables.

• Provide optimal support for the phased deployment.

• Consistent with emerging practices in HUIT.

• Reduce risk from the waterfall approach:

– "Big design up front" that results in bloated software

– Focus on exhaustive documentation rather than working software

– Elongated time frame to deliver new features

While this approach is unorthodox for PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, we

believe it is the right model for this project.

Agile / Scrum – Physical Manifestations

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Agile / Scrum – Physical Manifestations

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Agile / Scrum – Online Tracking

19

Agile / Scrum – Online Tracking

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Agile / Scrum – Online Tracking

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Agile Reporting – Burn Up Chart

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0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

Sprint1

Sprint2

Sprint3

Sprint4

Sprint5

Sprint6

Sprint7

Sprint8

Sprint9

Sprint10

Sprint11

Sprint12

Sprint13

Sprint14

Sprint15

Story Points

Burn Up Chart – Green Team

Total

Completed

Sprints to Complete ~ 7

Agile Reporting – Epic Health

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0 50 100 150 200 250 300

Cashiering

Configuration Guide

FA Compliance processes

FA Disbursement

GL Interface

Group Post

Interfaces - Inbound to CS

Interfaces - Outbound from CS

Nelnet

Payment Plans

Refunds

Reporting

Security

Service Indicators

Stipends

Taxes

Third-Party Contracts

Tuition Calculation

Green Team Marquee Features

Closed

In Progress

Open

Reopened

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HUIT Guiding Principles for User Experience

25

The HUIT Strategic Programs (SIS, TLT, IAM) are collaborating on this

strategy and we hope to export best practices for broader adoption!

• Similar tasks performed in similar ways 1

• Seamless navigation across applications 2

• Common branding, look and feel 3

• Aspire to a common mental model 4

Course Catalog @ Harvard

26

There are many ways that FAS students learn about and search for classes today;

we are eager to provide enhanced and flexible tools in the new system.

User Experience

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We have defined “excellent user experience” as one of our key commitments;

below are some examples of user interfaces that we might use as models.

How SIS Does User Experience

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User Research

• Pilot program (facilitated by Oracle) with faculty in December 2013

• Undergraduate focus groups started in April

• Engaged Undergraduate Council Education Committee in April

• Many more outreach efforts to come with faculty, graduate students, etc.

Prototyping

• Built prototypes of Advising Network Portal, Student Progress, Campus Mobile, etc.

• “Paper prototyping” exercise planned for late summer

• “Ghost Protocol” in Undergraduate Houses to gather broad input

Branding

• Applying HPAC standards to development instances

• Collaborating with TLT and IAM on style guide

We have initiated several efforts to support our UX mission.

Cloud Vision

30

We are aggressively pursuing a strategy of

migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for our

production infrastructure to support “Wave 1”

Quick Summary

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Instances currently at Amazon

• PeopleSoft “Sandbox”

– Testing grounds for SIS business analysts, consultants, and developers

– Accessible only via Harvard VPN (and tunnel to Amazon Private Cloud)

• Oracle Business Intelligence “Proof-of-Concept”

– OBIEE instance with sample “Class Enrollment” data model

– Access granted to primary technical contacts

• User Productivity Kit (UPK)

– Library of purchased help for PeopleSoft

– Repository of custom-developed help content

Instances previously at Amazon

• PeopleSoft Production Feasibility Study

– Built complete “production-like” stack

– Completed fail-over testing and performance scenarios

Next Steps

32

On Premises Production for Wave 0

• We are building out our PROD and P-1 instances at 60 Ox

• Topology designed to “stretch” in case we need to retain this model

Migration to Amazon Web Services

• Working assumption is migration to AWS PROD for Wave 1 go-live

• Issues to resolve:

– Monitoring and Job Scheduling

– Maintenance and Operations

– Detailed migration strategy

• Primary drivers for this migration are high availability, dynamic scalability,

and disaster recovery – cost is not the primary motivation

Carolyn Brzezinski (SIS Technical Lead) is talking about our Cloud

initiatives right now at the Summit!

Reporting and Analytics

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Reporting and Analysis are among the most powerful features of the new platform;

these tools enable trend analysis and academic planning activities.

DEMO: Ad Hoc Report in 3 Minutes

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LAUNCH DEMO

Watch this (and a few other videos) on your own…

http://upktraining.cadm.harvard.edu/ITSummit2014

Create Once Publish Everywhere – Enabled by Oracle UPK

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• In addition to our future Business Intelligence platform, you also just experienced

Oracle’s User Productivity Kit (UPK), a tool for authoring modules that can be

published in various output formats to address different learning styles.

PowerPoint Slides Process Docs / Job Aids

Online Simulation

(See / Try / Do)

User Acceptance

Test Scripts

Training Mechanisms

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Population Primary Training Mechanism Secondary Training

Mechanism

Staff • Classroom training

• User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

• Role-based learning paths via online

training tool(s)

• Integrated context-sensitive help

• Quick reference

guides

• Train-the-trainer

• Printable user

guides

Faculty • Quick reference guides

• Train-the-Trainer

(Dept. Admin / Faculty Asst.)

• In-person training (at faculty request)

• Video / simulations

• Integrated context-

sensitive help

• Printable user

guides

Students • Video / simulations

• Quick reference guides

• Required training during registration

process

• Integrated context-

sensitive help

• Drop-in hours /

"genius bar"

Change Management – Upcoming Actions

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Job Shadowing Other “Intelligence Gathering”

The Daily Life of an End User

Job Shadowing with offices due to

go live with Wave 0 and Wave 0.5

Refine notes and record CM

issues into JIRA

Identify the impacted roles and

processes

Vet with all to be sure everything

is captured

Stakeholder Analysis

Role-based analysis.

Develop CM strategies for both

communication and training.

Work with Communications &

Marketing Specialist, User

Experience Lead on

Communication Mechanisms.

Project Team Coordination

Regular meetings with Product

Owners.

Work with team members to develop

strategies around CM and training.

Documentation

When available, research information

on current processes and any training

materials.

Review websites, iSites, Confluence

and policy documentation

LIMS and other Meetings

Listening for the fears, concerns, and

positive reactions to demonstrations of

CS functionality.

Establish relationships with LIMs to

facilitate job shadowing activities.

Q&A

Contact me with questions or feedback:

jason_shaffner@harvard.edu

For more information on the project, visit our web page:

http://sis.huit.harvard.edu