Program Release a success
At first, second and third glance, Program Release is proving a big success in the world of large enterprise computing projects. The result is that UW System and the Madison, Milwaukee and Extension campuses now have a new set of tools to vastly improve the way grants, accounting, travel and other processes are handled on their respective campuses.
The 2008 Program Release was a two-year effort to develop new ways to administer grants, travel, staff effort reporting, accounts payable, purchasing, and accounting processes. During the week of February 18, the new integrated system was brought up successfully, ahead of schedule, with no glitches.
Project sponsor and UW-Madison Vice Chancellor for Administration Darrell Bazzell explained that changes to grant reporting were required by the government and other funding agencies. "These new systems enable us as institutions to more efficiently track grant income through expense and time accounting, and then back to the funding sources," he said. "This helps us reduce processing time while putting data at the hands of end-users."
Program Release brought another benefit to the university as well. "The most important thing that happened through this project is that we got people to work together toward a common goal," said Elise Barho, DoIT Project Manager. "This is almost more significant than any software brought online, because it taught us to work across departments on a common goal in a very large institution."
Program Release sub-projects were highly organized, with representatives from all departments that were responsible for the older systems. A Joint Project Manager Committee was composed of project managers from each of the five strategic projects and all other associated projects. A Joint Steering Committee led Program Release, with representatives from several UW-Madison departments and UW System Administration. The Grants sub-project is co-sponsored by Martin Cadwallader, Dean of the Graduate School, Ron Kraemer, CIO and Vice Provost for Information Technology and Darrell Bazzell.