In the last Colleague Implementation News we spoke of the "live dates" for implementation of various Colleague modules.

• Most system implementations take almost two years to accomplish.   That sounds like a long time (and for the implementation team leaders and members, it's a very long time indeed). Understand, however, that these are immense systems and almost every work process within the College that uses them has to be re-engineered from the old way of doing things into the "Colleague way."   That's a mammoth task and is why it takes so much work to implement these systems and modules.


• As we mentioned before, your Financials team has already brought live the majority of the Financials system (General Ledger, Purchasing and Accounts Payable).


• The "Live dates" for the HR modules Personnel and Payroll are when CTC will stop using its old personnel and payroll systems and begin using the new Colleague ones.   In this case the targets for Personnel and Payroll are to begin "parallel" processing in October and November 2004 and to target April 1, 2005 to stop using the legacy HP system. [Editor's note: Due to delays in delivery of a key interface dealing with calculation of state taxes, the HR live date was later moved to July 1.]


• For the Student System we are to start parallel operation during Summer 2 2005 (July) and to stop using the legacy system Fall 2005.


• "Parallel?"   "Stop using legacy HP?"   We have two phases that we'll take, both with the HR and the Student implementations.   We'll have a period called "parallel" where we actually start live processing of data in Colleague, but still leave the old (legacy) HP system processing.   Most often, the business that folks outside the implementation will see will be that of the legacy HP system.   It will look like that's all that's going on.   However, we'll actually also be duplicating all of that live activity in the Colleague system - we'll be in "parallel" operation.


• Although we often focus on the large system targets, (HR and Student), there will be many module live dates that comprise the overall system live dates.  For example, Personnel, Payroll, Admissions, Financial Aid, Registration, Curriculum, etc., will actually go live long before we consider their overall Systems (HR and Student) to be fully live.  

In the next Colleague Implementation News we'll talk about other live dates and about where we are now in the implementation process.

Find out more about the CTC Colleague Implementation