Monday, August 5, 2002

Future staff training sessions
Three one-hour sessions of the Banner Finance orientation class and a Purchasing 1 and Purchasing 2 class will be offered the week of August 12.  The next opportunity for Finance training will be the first or second week of October.

New Financial Aid trainer
The Financial Aid team lost their consultant due to medical difficulties.  SCT assigned Connie Alexander to complete the training for Financial Aid.

Extended Learning Update
Last week LIMT discussed how to address issues that are external to the LASR project, but have surfaced as the core teams work through the Banner implementation.  LIMT recommends that external issues be forwarded to the executive team to allow core teams to focus on the Banner implementation.

Finance Update
The Finance team continues to work on resolving the PO approval queue dilemma and will discuss it next week with the SCT  consultant.  Approval queues for journal entries are working and the adopted budget is being entered.  When that process is complete, the Budget Office will make adjustments to reflect changes that have occurred since the adoption of the budget. These changes will be made based on the organizational structure that was in place as of August 5.  This process should be complete by the end of September.  Departments will not have the option to process budget changes until the Budget Office has completed this work.  The first month-end closing ran last Monday and everything, including grants, was in balance.  The Finance Team is pleased with the Banner product and with the services provided by Computer Services.

Human Resources Update
Human Resources will proceed with implementing the lag payroll in January.  Two joint bargaining sessions have been held with faculty, classified and management to discuss the issue and a third meeting will be held with faculty.  Managers and classified have accepted the payroll change.  Memorandums of Understanding will be prepared for classified staff. 

Linda DeWitt and James Brunner are meeting weekly with the Human Resources core team  as the Human Resources implementation moves into the final months. 

The Human Resources executive director position has closed and applicants will be contacted next week to interview between August 27 through 30.  A hiring recommendation will be made to the president and Board of Education in September with a proposed start date of mid-October.  The Human Resources team joins the Finance team next week to work on position budget and control in Banner. 

Student Update
The Student Core Team is moving forward with the general plan to use existing state approved subject codes for credit courses and to use the same code, preceded by an “X” for Extended Learning offerings on similar subjects.  The team is comfortable with LIMT’s recommendation that issues external to the Banner implementation be  forwarded  to the Executive Team.  The team views their job as developing a course identification structure  that makes sense for the college.

A test set of approximately 200 catalog  entries will be loaded tomorrow in TEST.  There are some tables in the Lane database that should not be there.  It is possible the tables came from seed data , or from PPRD when it was cloned.   The team will identify tables with values that are incorrect.  As the Student Core Team loads tables, shared tables will be identified and brought to the attention of the Data Standards group and to LIMT if necessary.  The team is pleased with the new trainer.  Training is scheduled every month except March until the Student go live date on June 2. 

Financial Aid Update
The Financial Aid team received word on Monday that their trainer could not travel to LCC for the training sessions this week.  The team took the opportunity to join the Financial Aid Technical training sessions which were also scheduled this week.  Tables are being set up in TEST that are of sufficient variety to test tracking and development of student budgets.  The team is looking for illogical information on the FAFSA so rules can be built to handle various cases electronically that previously required Advisor review.   Financial Aid also wants to use Banner rules to scan the student system to reduce the number of student applications that have to be reviewed by a person.  The team has been considering whether to request Financial Aid be a test site for document imaging.  Because Financial Aid is without a director, it appears now would not be the best time to incorporate document imaging.

Other
It is becoming more difficult for LCC staff who have taught the Banner Finance classes to continue.   Monies are available to fund a full-time technical training coordinator position.  A training sub-team will be established to identify the audience, the blocks of training that will be needed, the types of curriculum for each block and how to develop and deliver the curriculum.  LIMT has been concerned about the finance training needs of 10-month employees who were not on campus to receive the July and August training.  LIMT learned that 10-month employees ordinarily do not work with budgets or purchasing so their training needs are not so crucial.  Linda Simmons, Stephen Pruch and Stan Barker will meet to get the process moving and report back to LIMT.

Human Resources is collecting curriculum to develop training materials for staff orientations in Fall term.  LIMT discussed delaying  the training until closer to January when staff will actually be using the new Human Resources system.