This has been an extremely busy week for the campus Human Resource office. They have been engaged in User Acceptace Testing (UAT) throughout the last few days. UAT is an overall 4 week effort for the UMass campuses to get into the upgraded software and test to see that data is migrated well from our older HR system and that they can use the new software to do their key tasks — hiring, enrolling in benefits, entering time, and processing pay checks. Within each of those broad areas there are many more specific tasks which are part of the testing process. This testing is primarily being done by Human Resource staff andwe are doing some testing using the security roles that a timekeeper or employee will have when we go live.

Testing is a frustrating task in any project as unfortunately you find things that don’t work. This week has been no exception as we had a lot of issues tied to security, some with hardware and connectivity, and others with some application issues. The campus and central project teams will work to resolve these issues quickly and they will be retested before we exit this testing phase. And while there were a fair volume of issues identified, there have not been any ‘show stoppers’ which should keep us from going-live with the system in April.

This week we also had some planning sessions for the training delivery that will be occuring. Jose Guerrero from Information Technology Training is currently developing the schedule of classes. More information with be forthcoming in the weeks ahead as all of the training will occur in March and into April.

If you have particular questions or concerns please let me know.

Regards,

Richard Conley
Campus Project Manager