The SCO project team continues to complete configuration and unit testing of SAP relative to the Civil Service (CS) department functionality.  They have also been working in partnership with other major State projects as needed, such as:

• FI$CAL (Financial Information Systems for California); which is a business transformation project for the state in the areas of budgeting, accounting, and procurement. It represents a partnership of the Department of Finance (DOF), the State Controller's Office (SCO), the State Treasurer's Office (STO) and the Department of General Services (DGS).
• Pension System Resumption (CalPERS); which will enable utilization of the Internet as a primary channel for conducting business.  It is an extension of the COMET (CalPERS Online Member Employer Transaction) strategy and will replace several existing systems.
• HRModernization (DPA/SPB), initiated to modernize and streamline the State's HR system to recruit, develop and maintain a well-qualified, high-performance workforce.

In May and June, the SCO team held Stakeholder meetings with over 250 attendees in Sacramento, San Francisco and Los Angeles geared to the CS departments to provide an overview of the Project and updates on status.    The team is now beginning to work with various CS departments to build an internal "Department Support Team" to help manage each department’s deployment efforts. This includes collection of additional data necessary for implementation, data cleansing, and department preparation of staff, processes and technology components.

Civil Service sessions have been completed to gather additional information to complete final design issues.

After an intensive schedule review and update, the Project team is also finalizing the system deployment approach and will share the proposed go-live deployment schedule with departments towards the end of June 2008.  The first deployment for CS is scheduled for 3rd (calendar) quarter of 2009.

• Business Process Team Update
  • Business Process Review
    • Campuses feedback related to the payroll-related business process documentation has been received and all campus comments have been reviewed. Accepted campus input has been incorporated into the respective processes and the documents are currently being edited for posting to the website as final.
  • Benefits Sub-Committee
    • The Benefits sub-committee team continues to teleconference weekly to document benefits-related processes and activities in accordance with the prescribed approach. This team is comprised of campus and Chancellor’s Office benefits subject matter experts.
  • Official Employment Roster
    • Discussions on the official employment roster continue between members of the Business Process Team and the SCO project team. PIMS legacy system data elements have been reviewed to determine their disposition of being available in SAP through an actual field or process that can capture the data, HR required data elements have been identified.
  • Standardizing Action Reason Codes/Usage
    • Standardizing Action Reason Codes and the usage of these codes will be another subcommittee of the Business Process Team. The objectives of this committee will be to validate and standardize action/reason code usage across the campuses; assist in data cleansing requirements to ensure data integrity for providing information to the data warehouse; establish documentation manual for coding and processing to establish uniformity and consistency for transactions and fields that comprise the Official Employment Roster. The action to review PeopleSoft fields and processes that are not captured in PIMS, but may be needed for the systemwide data warehouse, will be included as part of this process.
• Application Integration Team Update
  • Electronic Communication Options Between CSU and SCO Environments
    • A proof-of-concept effort was initiated and a prototype built to explore the communication options between the CSU and SCO application environments. After much infrastructure review and set-up, success was achieved in May when test data was successfully exchanged. General methods of communication interfaces have now been determined and these will be further explored in the prototype for more specific business processes. This activity paves the way for the next level of transactional analysis and design.
      
      While the SCO team works to finalize the Civil Service SAP transaction design, the above understanding assists CSU in the ongoing analysis, design and field mapping of the transactions for our CSU integration.
• Data & Reporting/Data Warehouse Team Update
  • HR Data/Reporting Business Requirements Findings Webcast
    • A webcast was held on June 25^th to share the 21^st Century HR Data/Reporting Business Requirements Findings document.
  • Reporting Model Design
    • The Data & Reporting/Data Warehouse team is currently working with HR-ISA on the design of a preliminary reporting model for employee history data.
  • Data and Process Profiling
    • The team will be commencing work with a pilot campus on data and process profiling.
• Change Management and Communication Team Update
  • SharePoint
    • The Change Management and Communication team is working with members of ITS to begin using SharePoint, a document collaboration tool. The team plans to begin using this tool to collaborate with project team members, beginning this summer.
  • Survey Process
    • The team created a survey process to coordinate activities related to collecting data from campus coordinators.
  • Meeting With SCO
    • The team met with members of the SCO organizational readiness team to discuss ways to partner and help facilitate each team’s communication efforts.

Be sure to check out the CSU/SCO 21^st Century Project list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) which is maintained on the project website. If you have any questions that you would like to see included in the FAQ list, please send them to 21questions@calstate.edu.

Ideas, comments, questions? Have news or other items you would like to see addressed in the next newsletter? If so, send an e-mail to 21questions@calstate.edu. We will attempt to address submissions that may be of interest to the CSU community. Please note that we may not be able to address all submissions.