UDFS Update for the week of 7/24

We are really getting rolling!! Last week, Jerry Kenney and Scott Smith of DigiTerra Consulting came in to give us a 2-day overview of the system and setup tables. This week, they came and gave an overview to the Steering Committee. As well as general dissemination of information, discussion occurred regarding which version of PeopleSoft (7.5 or 8.0) the University of Delaware should implement for financials. It was decided that the project team could continue its work with the 7.5 version as the functionality in 8.0 isn't changing dramatically, and that a decision to go to 8.0 could be made at a later date.

The Chart of Accounts sub-group (Carol, Roby, Jeff and Van) had a meeting on Tuesday. However, the bulk of this meeting was taken up with a discussion surrounding security issues (Psoft has basically no delivered security on the General Ledger) and reporting/query secured access. Van was asked to try to get data from the HR Psoft database into a format that would be accessible through an ODBC driver - sort of a first step to see how easy or difficult it is to create a data warehouse with PeopleSoft data.

Also, earlier in the week, a discussion was held regarding the line number concept & how that could be translated to PeopleSoft. Since we have previously agreed that the PSAccount (our current object code) for expenditures would start with numbers (to force them to the top of any dropdown box), we agreed that personnel expenditures for line item folks would start with 1, then be followed by a letter which denotes the type of personnel: P for Professional, F for Faculty, S for Salaried Staff, and M for AFSCME. The next two digits would be letters, which would be a unique combination for each PS Department. (There was some discussion about making the three letters unique for each position within the University, but it has not yet been decided what to do with that.)

A Team Leaders meeting was held on Thursday afternoon. At this meeting, which Roby chaired, the role of teams and team leaders was discussed, as was the Executive Team's involvement with the functional teams. The Web Site, calendar and training were discussed, and four more folks (Gerri Lear, Betty Baringer, Rachel Strickland, and probably Burt Wilson) will be attending the 8/28 training, in addition to the 5 that are already registered. The main tasks of the teams (for the near future, anyway) were laid out: Creating an events list, creating tables in PSoft, cataloging reports, and inventorying what information is retained outside of Psoft. The stance of the Executive Team regarding minimizing and possibly eliminating, modifications, customization, workarounds and preprocessing was discussed, as well as approval processes for those that the teams may wish to request. The role of the reporting team was discussed vis a vis the functional teams. The reporting team will focus on the tools that will be available and the other teams will figure out how to generate reports that they may need. The functional teams will probably meet every other week, and the team leaders will meet with the executive team about once a month, at least to start. The functional teams have an assignment to do their preliminary events list by the 8/14 meeting of the executive team. The final events lists are due by November 15.