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ITD Advantage delayed – temporarily

As most ITD employees are aware, the department’s Advantage go-live date has been postponed for a little while. We had reported in the Oct.28 Transporter that the use of electronic timesheets would begin in November with a complete go-live in December.

The Human Resources portion of the system did go live in October as planned and is being used in the department. But we weren’t able to resolve a few critical issues in the financial and procurement areas in time for the November date.

Consequently, the steering committee determined that delaying would be in the best interests of the department. Our commitment to provide a quality system remains a constant guiding principle for this project.

Although we’ve had to postpone, the good news is that we only had a few critical issues to work through and they have been resolved. We were able to begin final, end-to-end, user acceptance testing (UAT) on Dec. 12 and are very optimistic that the system will be ready to go for the new go-live dates.

We have completed the configuration of the production server. We are on the final steps of interface automation, and we have most of the reports ready to go. We also have completed the AP user training. Although we have four weeks available for UAT, which officially will finish on Jan. 6, we expect upwards of 130 people in the system during the first two weeks to complete the bulk of the testing by today (Dec. 23).

We have laid out a test plan to ensure that we hit all types of transactions, coding combinations, document types, etc., will run every interface and report, and will try to pump a large volume of data through all of our processes. We are confident that this final testing will provide the level of system confidence that we were unable to achieve in November.

When we delayed the project we had two options as to the length of delay and these options were driven by where the payroll cycle falls within the month. The first option of four weeks was determined to be impractical because the holidays were right in the middle of that time frame. Also, in November, we were still uncertain that the necessary system fixes would be delivered and in place.

The second option was for a 10-week delay, which was the one selected. So, with the 10-week delay, the use of electronic timesheets will commence on Jan. 17 and four weeks later, on Feb. 13, the entire system will go live.

The delay in the use of timesheets also has resulted in a delay of timesheet training.
Originally the next phase of timesheet training was scheduled for early January. We have postponed that training for a month, and it will now begin on Feb. 3. The schedule is being reworked and will be published when it becomes available.

For those of the first wave of timesheet users who had received training in October, and this primarily includes employees in the Division of Administration and all department timekeepers, we will be scheduling refresher training in January for those who feel they need it.

– Ken Stewart
Published 12-16-05