Spring/Summer 2000 - Vol. 51, No. 1

Upgrade It? Replace It? Or Start a Revolution? An Adventure Story from the University of Arkansas
Did Someone Mention Mistakes?
Did the university make mistakes as it built BASIS? Yes. It seriously underestimated the time it would take to design and program a completely new system. According to the original timeline, writing of the payroll and other HR-related applications would take 36 months, and creation of the business-related applications would take 42 months. But once the first four modules were in place, progress slowed dramatically, in part because of changes in leadership and resulting concern about administrative support. (The university had five vice chancellors for Finance and Administration, including two interim vice chancellors, while BASIS was under development.)

Once the kind of support that the project would require was understood, the computing services, business affairs, financial affairs, and HR heads agreed to commit the staff necessary to get the project done. (Two of Human Resources’ payroll experts were assigned essentially full-time to BASIS. To compensate for their absence, work was reorganized and redistributed. Some of the organizational changes turned out to be good ones, and much of the extra workload was relieved as new modules of BASIS were implemented.) The BASIS team was moved to a separate building, and programmers and application owners were put in adjacent offices. A senior administrator who had a good overview of the operations in Finance and Administration was made the team’s leader.
Introduction
So Many Needs
Any Capability I Want?
A Revolution is Sparked
Modules Away
1, 2, 3 Testing, Testing
Did Someone Mention Mistakes
Reaping the Rewards
At times, team members felt uncertain about administrative support and their morale was threatened by events over which they had no control. One tactical error that shook the team and nearly undermined the project was the decision to implement two fairly complex modules simultaneously. Both modules required extensive training for department users and major changes in departmental procedures. Once users became accustomed to the new system, their resistance diminished, and most eventually agreed that it was easier to enter “EE” on a screen for “end employment” than it was to type information on a seven-page NCR personnel action form.

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