ESUP student workers get real life experience

This summer, four student workers helped keep the ESUP team moving forward. While two have moved on, two will remain throughout the school year. Program Director Andy Hill said of the student workers, “We really appreciate having the opportunity to give real life work experience to our students. They have been great contributors to the Program as they have learned to apply their education to real life software development, project management, and other project related activities.” 

Student workers (left to right): Ryan, Chris, and Anna. Not pictured: James

One of ESUP’s first student workers is Chris. Coming from Duluth, MN, Chris enjoys working at ESUP because he thinks it’s beneficial to work on a team in a real work environment. Another positive of working for ESUP is learning and using skills that are potentially relevant to his computer science major. Chris’s supervisor Shannon Gibson, Application Development project director, said he has been a “wonderful addition to the application development team, assisting with PeopleSoft builds for the Campus Solutions workstream.” Chris has enjoyed learning how a real office environment functions and the steps and processes that go into getting things done. Chris will continue to work for ESUP throughout the year. 

Anna made great contributions to ESUP this summer by, “[being] a quick study on the PeopleSoft Portal tool helping us enter content for the rough draft,” according to her supervisor Susan Geller, Portal project director. Geller is continually impressed with Anna, saying, “she even put her academic training in communications to use in our brand genesis project.” A Plymouth, Minnesota native, Anna enjoys playing tennis, spending time outdoors and traveling as much as possible. She will continue her time with ESUP throughout the school year, and describes her time at ESUP, so far, as “insightful” because of “[the opportunity] to work closely with the portal leadership team and to see the progression of the portal and all the decisions that go along with that.” 

James was another ESUP student employee this summer. Though he has returned to school up in UND where he is studying to be a teacher, his favorite thing about working for ESUP was being exposed to new opportunities. Whether it was learning new computer skills or meeting new people, James described his experience at ESUP as “enjoyable” because of all the new people he met and his contribution to a project. Outside of school and work, James’s favorite activities are photography and lacrosse.

Ryan, ESUP’s fourth summer student employee, spent his time working as a program assistant, which means he helped with any and all projects. Ryan is a double anthropology and political science major who is headed to Amman, Jordan for fall semester where he will study at the Jordanian Institute for Diplomacy in Amman. He hopes to strengthen his Arabic, meet the locals and immerse himself in the Jordanian culture. 

ESUP greatly appreciated everyone’s hard work and looks forward to finding new learning opportunities for their student employees.

ESUP Update 08/26/13 - 09/09/13

ESUP welcomes new consultants
If you walk through 150 Williamson Hall this week, you’ll see a new work area in the back corner where a conference table used to sit. This is the new home of the Identity Management (IdM) project and its PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) consultants. Click here for more information.

New Program Director search announced
On August 9, 2013, the ESUP Executive Oversight Committee announced the posting for a new Program Director position. Since this is a substantial organizational change, ESUP Change Management and Communications team pulled together a few questions for the executives. The following Q&A is based on discussions with Robert Elde, Dean of the College of Biological Sciences, and Kathryn Brown, Vice President of Human Resources. Click here to read the Q&A.

Reporting staff unveil student reporting prototypes
Recently, staff from the ESUP Reporting and Data Management (RDM) Team created several reporting prototypes and are now sharing them with multiple stakeholder groups to find the best solution that will meet their reporting needs. Click here for more information.

Quick hits and reminders from across the work streams

• The HRMS work stream has scheduled a second collaboration session with the Finance and Reporting and Data Management work streams for Thursday, Sept. 5, from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in 101 Walter Library. Attendees will review the proposal for the re-structuring and implementation of appointment data at the core of the HRMS upgrade project. Please attend if you are interested in this important issue!


• Integration Project Director Tim Gagner, Portal Project Director Susan Geller, and other ESUP staff will give presentations and answer questions at the next IDEAA group meeting on August 27 at 1 p.m. in 155 Nicholson Hall.


• The Portal Leadership Team held a retreat on Monday, August 19, to prepare for launching a content governance process for the new portal, and to get ready for a busy fall, including the release of the rough draft of the portal.


• Many Student work teams will not meet over the next two weeks due to the start of fall term. Please go to the ESUP Student calendar for up-to-date information.

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ESUP welcomes new consultants

If you walk through 150 Williamson Hall this week, you’ll see a new work area in the back corner where a conference table used to sit. This is the new home of the Identity Management (IdM) project and its PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) consultants.

ESUP hired PwC to help the University migrate from its homegrown legacy identity platform, more commonly known as X.500, to implementation of the Oracle Identity Manager (OIM).

PwC has a strong, positive work history on projects similar to ESUP at other large, complex institutions. “PwC brings the experience, knowledge, and skills from implementing OIM and related modules at institutions with user bases over 100,000 people,” said Arash Forouhari, ESUP Identity Management project director. “They have the ability and resources to take what we have now, a system that’s over 15 years old, and migrate it to the new environment by the time ESUP goes live in the fall of 2014.”

About half of the total PwC team started on August 19 to get going with the Analyze and Design phase of the project. By October, PwC will have 15 staff people dedicated to ESUP until it’s complete.

The PwC Team and Arash Forouhari on the far right.	The U of M Team working on idM and Arash's twin (just kidding).

"We are happy to have PwC on-board to help us with our IdM project being led by Arash,” said ESUP Program Director Andy Hill. “They bring great expertise to assist us with implementing this complicated and necessary software."

Send an email to esup@umn.edu if you have any questions about the Program or the idM project.

New Program Director search announced

On August 9, 2013, the ESUP Executive Oversight Committee announced the posting of a new Program Director. Since this is a substantial organizational change, ESUP Change Management and Communications team pulled together a few questions for the executives. The following Q&A is based on discussions with Robert Elde, Dean of the College of Biological Sciences, and Kathryn Brown, Vice President of Human Resources.

What does the University gain by adding this executive leadership layer? What are the opportunities you see?

This decision manifests the executive's overwhelming desire to see ESUP succeed. ESUP is a highly visible University priority, and the executives want to optimize this shared investment.

As the program shifts from planning to implementation, the Executive Oversight Committee feels that the time is right to bring in a seasoned leader with experience tying together a program of this complexity. They want to add a leader with more experience in managing programs of this scope: a leader who has practical experience mitigating risks and schedule slippages that might occur as ESUP approaches program launch. The executives want this to be seen as a supportive move - an opportunity to improve the program.

What areas of weakness were identified in the current program? How did they manifest themselves?

The executives have not identified any specific areas of weakness. The program continues to be on time, on scope, and on budget. Executives expressed a belief that the risk of implementing the multiple complex components of this program might be mitigated by finding someone with experience and expertise in implementations of this size.

The executives expressed a sincere hope that the ESUP team and the University at large do not see this as an expression of any specific, identified risk or weakness in the current program or current program leadership. They hope this new senior leader will have significant practical experience in risk interventions in a program of this magnitude; they view this position as an added safety net.

What will happen next?

The new senior leadership position has been posted. The salary will be funded from the program's budget. The Executive Oversight Committee is the hiring authority. They have empowered business process owners Lori Lamb, Susan Van Voorhis, Mike Volna, and Sharon Ramallo, representing the program’s HRMS, Student, Finance, and IT projects, to screen candidates. The program leadership team will have a chance to provide input during the hiring process. The goal is to complete the hiring within the next month or so.

This new position will report to the Executive Oversight Committee; current Program Directors Andy Hill (UofM) and Rebecca Collings (CCI) will report to the new Program Director, and all other reporting lines will remain unchanged at this time. The program is going well; the executives want to have as little disruption as possible.

Meanwhile the executives hope that the team will continue to operate under the leadership of Andy and Rebecca as effectively as it has since program inception.

Reporting staff unveil student reporting prototypes

Recently, staff from the ESUP Reporting and Data Management (RDM) Team created several reporting prototypes and are now sharing them with multiple stakeholder groups to find the best solution that will meet their reporting needs. Sharing the prototypes also provides an opportunity to  explore new features available with the system upgrade.

Using functional designs from the Student work stream, RDM staff made the prototypes with PeopleSoft (PS) delivered reporting technology to demonstrate what staff can do using real-time data and highlight functionality of the new system.

Over the last couple of weeks, ESUP Student Reporting Lead Kristeen Anderson and other team members presented the prototypes to the following groups:

• Student Leads
• ESUP work stream project directors
• Twin Cities Academic Support Resources directors
• Student financial leads and analysts
• Financial Aid Functional steering committee
• All Student Meeting
• Student work stream leads

Kristeen Anderson presenting prototypes at All Student meeting

“Basically, we want to share the prototypes because we need our stakeholders’ acceptance to use PeopleSoft technology to deliver reports,”  said Anderson.

So far the response has been positive. “It will be great to have the additional flexibility these reports provide including the drill down functionality”, said Kris Wright, director of Student Finance in Academic Support Resources.

Anderson and the RDM Team plan to start sharing a few HR reporting prototypes at the HRMS work stream team meeting on August 15. Please email esup@umn.edu with questions about the prototypes or for more information.

ESUP Update 8/12/13 - 8/26/13

Portal team holds rapid prototype usability evaluation
Last week, members of the portal team piled into the Usability Lab at Walter Library to evaluate the first paper prototype of the new U of M portal. Users explored a paper rendering of how the portal might be organized and gave feedback to help design future versions. Click here for more information.

UMContent to Drupal: What will it mean?
One of the changes coming with the new portal will be the way content providers at the University manage their web content. The initial focus of the Drupal project is to move systems off of the current UMContent system, provided by the Office of Information Technology. Click here to read more about Drupal and the new portal.

ESUP Video: Single Sign On (SSO)
Arash Forouhari, ESUP project director for Identity Management (IdM), explains the current state of single sign-on (SSO) at the University and what will change. Click on the link to watch the video!

ESUP Change Management continues outreach
The ESUP Change Management team continues working its broad engagement plan.  Each work stream is striving to expand direct contact with relevant stakeholders during Phase 2: Analyze and Design. Click here to read more.


Quick hits and reminders from across the work streams

• The Executive Oversight Committee has made a change to ESUP’s organizational structure. In a memo sent to team members on Friday, Dean Robert Elde, EOC chair, lauded the Program for its “steady and remarkable progress since its launch in October 2012”, and announced a search for a Program Director to oversee both the University’s program team and the Cedar Crestone consultants as the Program enters the next phase of testing and implementation. 
• Great news for ESUP! Identity Management’s (IdM) contract with PricewaterhouseCoopers was approved, as was Testing’s contract with HP Quality Center. Stay tuned to the blog for more information on these approvals. Congrats!
• The Integration web page has been updated to include the most current versions of the Application System Survey Contacts List, the Consolidated Application List, the Data Warehouse Mapping example, and the PeopleSoft Mapping example. These documents were shown at the July 29, IDEAA meeting.

Subscribe to the ESUP Blog!
Get each new blog post delivered to your inbox by entering your email address in the Subscribe by Email window at upgrade.umn.edu and following the instructions. Once your subscription is activated, you will receive an email alerting you to new ESUP posts late in the afternoon the day they are published. If there is no post, you receive no email -- simple as that!

Portal team holds rapid prototype usability evaluation

Portal Paper Prototype

Last week, members of the portal team piled into the Usability Lab at Walter Library to evaluate the first paper prototype of the new U of M portal. Users explored a paper rendering of how the portal might be organized and gave feedback to help design future versions.

“I really struggle navigating around the U [website] now,” said one participant. “I like this because everything is in one place.” Participants also liked having their most important tools at the top of the page, and being able to reorganize their tools.

There were criticisms, too. Early prototypes are very basic-looking, and one participant said, “this feels dry, not ‘Driven to Discover’.” The portal team is working with University Relations on getting the U’s branding and look and feel into the portal designs.

The “rapid” portion of Rapid Prototyping involved giving morning participants one version, then rebuilding it based on their feedback over lunch and giving afternoon participants a new version. The afternoon versions tested better on navigation and were praised as “personalized and efficient.”

The team will take the feedback from this usability testing to help design the “rough draft” prototypes being released in fall 2013. These internet prototypes will have an interface like the paper prototypes, except they will be displayed online with active links. However, the prototypes will not be fully functional or interact with real data. More rounds of usability testing with randomly selected participants are scheduled for this fall and winter. Visit the University’s Usability Lab website for more information on the lab and their services.

Stay tuned to the ESUP and Portal blogs -- we’ll post links to the “rough draft” prototypes when they’re available for your feedback!

UMContent to Drupal: What will it mean?

One of the changes coming with the new portal will be the way content providers at the University manage their web content. The initial focus of the Drupal project is to move systems off of the current UMContent system, provided by the Office of Information Technology. There have been some drawbacks to UMContent that are addressed in Drupal:

• Increased performance - Drupal will have better performance than UMContent which is being used beyond the software's capacity.
• Website publishing is instantaneous.
• Widely used open source product - Drupal is widely used around the world and has a robust community contributing to the core and modules.
• Modular - Drupal is designed to be customizable and expandable.  Need a feature that isn't in Drupal core: "There's a module for that".  If there isn't, build it.
• Drupal is not only content management but also hosting.  By switching to Drupal, the University is not only removing the UMContent infrastructure, but also reducing the need for web servers to host the websites.

The main impact of moving to Drupal is that it provides a more feature-rich content management for current users of UMContent. Where does the new portal come in? The University is planning to build integration between Drupal and the portal so that updates of content in Drupal are reflected in the portal with no extra effort. So when someone updates a public-facing website, the content will be the same in the portal.

Content providers at the U can take advantage of these new features by moving to Drupal, however, adoption will not be initially mandated. Drupal implementation will tentatively happen in late 2013; the portal will be available in late 2014. Interested in more about providing content for the portal? Contact Scott Barnard about the Portal Content Providers group.

Still have questions about Drupal and the new portal? Email us at esup@umn.edu.

ESUP Video: Single Sign On (SSO)

Arash Forouhari, ESUP project director for Identity Management (IdM), explains the current state of single sign-on (SSO) at the University and what will change.

Enjoy!

As always, please send your questions or comments to esup@umn.edu.

Update: This video is in the context of only Internet Id/password (ie, GMail) and not 2-factor authentication (ie, enterprise systems).