Lessons Learned – Managing big projects on tight deadlines

Georgetown University recently implemented the SunGard Banner 8.0 Student Information System (SIS). While the Banner SIS provided a wealth of functionality that aided Georgetown University’s multi-campus students, faculty, and staff populations, significant customizations to the SIS were still needed to replicate functionality existing in the University’s legacy system. Chief among the list of customizations needed was a preregistration system that streamlined student selection and scheduling while increasing staff efficiency, improving the student advisement process and enhancing course demand planning.

Knowing that the technical staff was heavily involved in the actual Banner implementation, Georgetown University turned to IData for their preregistration system solution. There was a gauntlet of challenges including a formidable list of requirements, multiple implementation sites, a host of stakeholders, and a tight deadline. Despite these challenges, the Preregistration project was successfully implemented by a team of IData’s Technical Consultants under the stewardship of IData’s President, Brian Parish, and one of IData’s leading Project Directors, Jamie Barnes. The IData team worked closely with a core team of Georgetown University project stakeholders to meet their goals.

The Preregistration project’s high degree of success was achieved by adhering to established project management methods that included process transparency, earned value task tracking, prescriptive use of the project lifecycle, and establishment of clear milestones to facilitate adherence to project schedule.

One of the most important lessons learned on this project was the value of project management. When faced with a large and complex project, it’s hard to over-estimate the value of meticulous project management. “Georgetown faced serious challenges – an aggressive deadline, coordinating development efforts among local and remote employees, communicating and resolving issues in a timely and effective manner, and finding time for task completion when staff was already overbooked” said Barnes of the Preregistration project. It was crucial for project success to keep clients and developers engaged and involved at every step of the way.

How do you effectively manage and test a project like the Preregistration project? “It’s important to set milestones and work hard to meet them. Plan for deadlines and be prepared for them to come at you fast,” said Barnes. “Ultimately, it is IData’s job to make the technology work for the client. The best way to do that is to carefully manage the projects we are entrusted with to ensure they are designed and delivered with the least stress for our clients.”

In the interest of making the project a success, IData focused on teamwork, communication, and testing.

Teamwork. IData consultants and University stakeholders worked as a team to achieve overall project success. People are one of the single-most important factors in project success. Creating a sense of community when working on a project of this size encourages clients and consultants work together through setbacks to achieve success.

Communicate Effectively. Email serves as a convenient and easy method to raise issues and keep everyone informed but important issues can quickly become lost in daily email traffic. IData established a communication plan at the start of the project that included weekly client conference meetings to communicate project issues, obtain client feedback and ensure stakeholders stayed focused on project schedule and budget.

Test early, test often. The Preregistration project’s high degree of success is due in large part to the extensive testing completed by Georgetown University project stakeholders and the IData team. In Project Director Jamie Barnes words, “Never underestimate the value of testing. The consequences of not testing can mean havoc in the system, so we test, test, and retest to make certain the results we expect are achieved.” Focused testing in this way encourages teamwork, aids development efforts, and saves the client from implementing software that may need expensive enhancements in the future. In addition, the focused testing milestones ensured valuable feedback on every part of the software from the design and workflow to unexpected project issues that were resolved before the project went live. Because informed users who have a voice in the process are more likely to rapidly adopt the software solution once it’s in place, University students and faculty members were asked to assist in focused testing.

The end result – an outstanding product, custom designed, built, and implemented on schedule by a team of experts working directly with Georgetown University. All of this was accomplished with an eye toward easing the process, from start to finish, for our clients. That’s the IData difference.