University officials have stalled the implementation of Banner, the new campus-wide student records database, while they revamp the project's management and oversight, adding years to the timeline and about $13 million to the budget. The original plan was unrealistic and under-informed, administrators said.
A new implementation plan, including a more realistic timeline and budget, is expected to be released in January.
Associate Provost Nancy Dunbar, who was asked by Provost Robert Zimmer to help facilitate the new planning process, told The Herald that the University's original implementation plan failed to account for the complexity of a system like Banner, which will replace 11 separate computer systems currently maintained by individual campus offices such as the Admission Office and Registrar's Office.
The most visible and highly anticipated component of Banner is online course registration.
"A few months ago, the University recognized that the project plan that laid out what was going to happen when was just not going to work," Dunbar said.
The problems of the initial implementation plan cannot be attributed to any one person, software bug or planning miscalculation, Dunbar said. Though the University encountered flaws in the newly developed version of the Banner software and had to deal with personnel issues such as staff illnesses, she said the critical problem was that project management was insufficient for the scope of the project - one of the largest undertakings in the University's recent history.
"These are huge systems. They involve (dozens of) offices and an extraordinary amount of technical expertise. They are very complicated to plan and execute because of their sheer size," Dunbar said, citing "dependencies" within Banner that require departments to be converted to the database in a specific order.
University officials underestimated Banner's complexity, Dunbar said. "We were probably a little bit too aggressive about our schedule. We built it on a best-case scenario without enough respect to the way life intervenes," she added.
"What the president and provost said is that if we're off schedule, let's step back. We now have a wealth of knowledge that we didn't have when we started planning this process, so let's take enough time to figure out what we were doing very well and want to continue and what adjustments we want to make," Dunbar said.
The most pressing task before University officials is to prepare a reliable timeline and budget for the process. Administrators hope to announce the new timeline in January.
"We want to be very careful about setting clear milestones, making sure that we understand all the dependencies that have to be met in order to meet that milestone, and then build a schedule we have strong confidence in," Dunbar said.
One change concerns the amount of staff and money allocated to Banner. "It seemed clear that we really hadn't devoted enough resources to the project. We probably needed more staff on it, and staff cost money. We needed to reassess the resource commitment to the project," Dunbar said.
University officials originally estimated startup costs of about $10 million with annual operating expenses of $250,000 to $300,000. The new budget isn't yet finalized, but Zimmer told the faculty at its October meeting that implementation will cost about $23 million - $13 million more than originally predicted. Annual operating costs for Banner would be about $1 million more than first predicted, Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration Elizabeth Huidekoper said at the November faculty meeting.
Most of the additional funding will support increased staffing, Dunbar said.
The more salient change is a redesigned project management model headed by two leaders, Dunbar said.
The project manager will be responsible for traditional coordination duties. It is not yet clear who the new project manager will be, but Dunbar said the University will probably hire someone with experience with Banner from outside the University. That person will work exclusively on Banner while at Brown and will leave when the database is implemented, Dunbar said.
Dunbar said she has taken on the other leadership role as a "functional project owner." Her job is to involve the entire University in decisions that arise during implementation.
The decision of whether to discontinue the print version of the Course Announcement Bulletin is an example of a functional question related to Banner.
Dunbar will solicit opinions from different groups on behalf of the senior administration and update the University on Banner's progress.
The structure of the project leadership before the current revamping is not entirely clear - Dunbar said a team of people was involved - but it appears that Computing and Information Services was forced to shoulder too much of the burden.
"Inadvertently we ended up allowing it to be more of a CIS project than we originally intended. That's where we didn't have the management quite right," Dunbar said.
Though CIS is obviously central to the Banner project, Dunbar said CIS officials weren't able to manage the project alone because CIS administrators couldn't focus all of their efforts on Banner and can't coordinate decisions involving the entire University, such as whether to continue the printed course catalog.
The new project structure recognizes the University-wide nature of the project by placing the leadership responsibility in the hands of an administrator dedicated exclusively to Banner and another - Dunbar - whose position already puts her outside of any one department.
Despite the delay, Dunbar stressed the inroads that University administrators have made since implementation of Banner first started. Each department that will use Banner - such as the Admission Office and Registrar's Office - has a functional team composed of department administrators, CIS staff and experts from the company that produces Banner. These teams have been working on training and preparation for the conversion to Banner, Dunbar said.
Employees involved in the project are enthusiastic, optimistic and confident about the University's ability to get the job done properly, Dunbar said.
The Medical School is already successfully using Banner for its admission database. That implementation was easiest because the Med School's admission office did not have a pre-existing system that needed to be converted to Banner, Dunbar said.
