Teams pull off major overhaul of student records system without a hitch
Here’s a question for undergraduate students: Notice anything different in the systems that manage your courses, grades, transcripts, financial aid and other essentials of student life? No? Good.
That means that a $15-million, more than a decade-long project to upgrade the student records system at UCLA did just what it was supposed to do: Provide added capabilities without skipping a beat. The relative invisibility of the changeover — at least to students — was one of the goals.
Until late October, students were using an antiquated system that was put in place in 1981 — before most of them were born. Although it had been modified along the way, it was showing its age even 10 years ago, when it was decided that something must change.
But what road to take? Buy a costly new system off the shelf? Modify the one the campus already had at great — but not as great — expense? And, if the latter, exactly who would oversee this enormous task? Because it isn’t just a student who needs access to his or her information. It’s every entity on the campus, including such major operations as the College of Letters and Sciences, every academic department and the Registrar’s Office.
Everyone who conducts student business, which means virtually everybody on campus, in one way or another interfaces with the system that is the repository of student record data.
Jim Davis, associate vice chancellor for information technology, who became intimately involved in the transition from the old to the new system, compared the quandary facing the campus to that confronting owners of aging homes.
“Do you buy a whole new house, or do you remodel and maintain your house so that you can keep it going for a longer period of time?” Davis asked. “We decided that the house, although old, was quite good, and that if we invested in it, we could live in it quite a bit longer and get good use out of it.”
What exactly needed to be done?
- The biggest and most important job was to rewrite the old Student Record System (SRS, or SR1) on the mainframe computer. The new project was dubbed SR2.
- Along the way every system that interfaced with the Student Record System on the mainframe had to change to accommodate the new Student Record System, including admissions; financial aid; billing and receivable; payroll; and systems in many academic and administrative units across campus. Also involved were the University Records System Access (URSA), which at the same time would update and "re-architect" its software; and the Student Records Database (SRDB), which would have to be upgraded for SR2 at the same time of the major changeover.
The SR2 team, led by Associate Registrar for Systems Arun Pasricha (sixth from the right), brought in the $15 million project on time and on budget. They later celebrated its completion at a Faculty Center reception.
And because the Student Records Database was changing, all campus applications using SRDB as a data source also had to change their applications to work with SR2. This included such heavily used applications as My.Ucla, Schedule of Classes, Counselor Desktop, SRWeb, etc. Every school, department and office would be affected, including housing, parking and athletics.
“In the end, everyone on campus relies on student data,” said the associate registrar for systems, Arun Pasricha. He said that although SR1 labored on, it would have stopped working unless significant structural changes were made by 2014.
“Making changes to SR1 had become very complex,” Pasricha said. “We learned to live with its limitations and developed many workarounds.” But obviously, it was time for an` overhaul.
The complexity of this endeavor over almost a decade required extensive campus collaborative development before the old systems could be safely shut down with the confidence that the new ones could take over.
Despite the decision to go ahead with the upgrade on campus, work went very slowly for the first several years and was in danger of collapsing.
“It was such an overwhelming task, and we were not well organized for it,” said Tom Lifka, associate vice chancellor of Student Academic Services, a major stakeholder of the project. “People were trying to do their regular jobs and do this as well. We realized that if we were going to do this, we had to take a significantly different approach.”
Joining in the celebration was the University Records System Access (URSA) team, which updated and "re-architected" its software to work with the new SR@ system.
In 2005, funding finally was put in place from various parts of the campus — including the Chancellor’s Office — to accomplish this task. Pasricha and Nick Reddingius, director of architecture and infrastructure practice, led a group to re-scope and redesign the project. Pasricha was put in place as the program manager to lead the project and coordinate with various units around campus that would be needed.
The last weekend in October was selected for the deployment because that is traditionally the quietest time of the academic year in terms of use. In 2005, looking ahead at all that had to be done to prepare, the date certain was set for four years hence: Oct. 24-26, 2009.
Everything led up to that date, when the old system would be shut down and left sitting there while the new system was brought up and the old data converted to the new format.
“It was akin to replacing the engine, wheels and the drive train of a race car during a race,” Davis said. “You had to do as much as you possibly could without stopping it.” Extending the automobile analogy, Davis said that on the final weekend, the various teams virtually manned a “pit stop” in an ongoing race.
“They stopped the system for one weekend, made the final changes and restarted the engines,” Davis said. “From the perspective of the students and staff that use the system, the car never stopped.”
Pasricha gave high praise to the core team that was dedicated to working on the Oct. 24-26 changeover, including almost 30 from the Registrar’s Office and Administrative Information Systems, which manages campus-wide administrative computing systems and data, including student records; and another 40 or so from other areas of the campus as well as private contractors.
A cake at the reception put the $15 million project, which took more than a decade to complete, in perspective.
Others involved, in turn, praised Pasricha as “the one who made this happen.”
“It was on time and on budget,” Registrar Anita Cotter said. “We’ve now got a whole new foundation that will allow us to present more features and keep up with technology.”
Caroline West, director of the Office of Analysis and Information Management, said the teams that oversaw the changeover were “the most proactive, professional and responsive people that I’ve had the pleasure to work with in systems development project.”
“They reached out over and over again and said, ‘What do you need?’” West said “They tested and retested, and redid things as often as needed.”
Pasricha said that during development of SR2, changes to the old system had to be minimized because the same changes would need to be reflected in the new system and managing that process would get too complicated.
“The campus has been very patient about the discretionary changes, because they knew we were in the middle of this development,” Pasricha said. “Now we are better able to accomplish those requests.”
Lifka said that he compared launching SR2 to the opening of the Wooden Recreation Center or the Arthur Ashe Center for Student Health and Wellness.
“It’s different than a building, but this made a contribution to the basic workings of the campus that the campus relies in day in and day out,” Lifka said. “And to have it go through without a hitch — it gives us a chance to recognize that, even in a time of budgetary doom and gloom, something like this can be done and done right — on time and on budget.”
There were many people involved in the central and distributed campus units who worked in concert to make the changeover successful. Among the key people were Edith Celestine, AIS director of student applications; SR 2 project manager Gail Johnson; Associate Registrars Cathy Lindstrom-Jacobson and Kathleen Copenhaver, who conducted training sessions; and former Associate Registrar Larry Inks, who managed the staff that worked on the process of converting the data for the 800,000 active records to the new data structure.
As Celestine said, “It was truly a ‘village’ project.”
