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Some new business processes, such as online requisitions or pre-award grants will be phased in starting in October. Other business processes, such as the online travel request form or the personnel requisition form, won’t change under the new system in the near term.

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What types of training roles are there?
There are four distinct roles within the system: core user, secondary user, supervisor, and faculty grant recipient. Core users are those that will work directly with the system entering transactions in HR and Finance. Secondary users are people that backup the core users in a department when the core user is unavailable. In many instances a person may be a core user for one system (HR) and a secondary user on another system (Finance). Supervisory staff are those responsible for supervising the core users in a department and those responsible for organizing work duties in a department. Faculty grant recipients are faculty who have financial responsibility for managing their grant awards and need to understand our business systems.

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What courses are being offerred?
Introduction to PeopleSoft – This course is a 1-hour introduction to PeopleSoft and is designed to let people see a demonstration of the software and try out a sample transaction. It is designed to introduce participants to the basic language of PeopleSoft before they come to the HR and finance training.

Chart of Accounts – This course is a 2-hour lecture format that is designed to explain the new PeopleSoft account structure and how it relates to your current FAS account numbers. This course is a mandatory prerequisite for anyone taking Finance or HR training. Note: As of July 2003, this subject matter has been incorporated into the Basic Finance class.

Basic Finance – This course is four half-days (3.5 hours per day). This course is designed to teach the basic financial business processes related to procurement, procurement cards, and financial reporting. It is broken into four distinct units – basic financial reporting, procurement basics, procurement card, and post-award grants reporting. This course if intended for core users and secondary users. It is a prerequisite for Intermediate Finance.

Basic HR – This course is four half-days (3.5 hours per day). This course is designed to teach the basic HR business processes related to employment (hiring, reclassifications, terminations) and the new time entry process. This course will cover policy and procedure changes in addition to using the new software

Intermediate Finance - This course is two half days. This course is designed to teach financial business processes related to journal entries, budget amendments, and other financial processes occasionally used.

PeopleSoft for Supervisors – This course is two half-days. The course is designed to give an overview of the new business processes with special emphasis on internal control and review of new business processes. One half-day will focus on HR and one half day will focus on Financials.

PeopleSoft for PI’s – This course content has not been finalized. We will work with a focus group of Principal Investigators to get the content defined and documentation developed. It is possible that documentation and web-based training may be sufficient for most grant recipients.

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How are people identified and scheduled for training?
The Delta team is working with divisional training and support coordinators to identify the people for training. While everyone who needs training will be given training, our initial priority is training core users first, followed by secondary users and supervisors. We are working with the divisional training and support coordinators to make certain that every department has at least one person trained on basic HR and basic Finance processes by July 1

We have identified approximately 150 people as core users of each system and we will make certain that these people get the training they need. Beyond this number we will work with the training and support coordinators to get the number of secondary users that need training in an area outside their primary job function to serve as a backup.

The seven PeopleSoft Division Training & Support Coordinators are:

Administrative Affairs
Clolita Williams (5-2772 or cwilliam@umbc.edu)

Arts and Sciences
Janie Stevenson (5-3228 or jstevens@umbc.edu)

College of Engineering
Jim Milani (5-3556 or milani@umbc.edu)

Graduate School
Patty Keys (5-3578 or pkeys1@umbc.edu)

President and OIA
Sandy Campbell (5-6878 or campbell@umbc.edu)

Provost
Bill Hoffman (5-6517 or whoffman@chpdm.umbc.edu)

Student Affairs
Deb Moriarty (5-3797 or moriarty@umbc.edu)

Each divisional training and support coordinator will be helping to:

- Make sure the right people are identified for training;
- Work within the division to provide backup and support, if necessary, when people are out for training;
- Identify peer mentors within the division for early training;
- Work with OIT to reschedule training, if necessary;
- Keep the division head apprised of progress in training people; and
- Provide feedback on training back to the Delta Steering Committee.

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When will training begin and what choices will I have in scheduling this training?
Chart of Accounts training for the campus will begin the week of May 19th. Since this course is the key prerequisite we will run multiple sessions of this course during the week of May 19th and May 26th. We will continue to run this training through June with at least two courses per week. We recommend that people take this course reasonably close to when they will take either the basic finance or basic HR course.

Basic Finance training for the campus will begin May 27 and run half-days Tuesday through Friday (due to Memorial holiday on Monday). In subsequent weeks these courses will run Monday through Thursday. We will run two courses each morning and two courses each afternoon.

Basic HR training for the campus will begin June 9 and run half-days Monday through Thursday. We will run two courses each morning and two courses each afternoon. The new HR system goes live in mid-July.

The Delta team is working with each divisional training and support coordinator to keep divisional members together in training as much as possible. We will provide every division with at least two different weeks for each training course. If individuals require special schedules we will work with the training & support coordinator to schedule someone into a training session outside of the weeks planned for that division.

While the Office of Information Technology will not directly schedule users within a division, we will maintain class rosters that divisional training coordinators define. All PeopleSoft training workshops, locations, instructors and trainees will be maintained in the PeopleSoft Training” account in UMBC’s CorporateTime calendar. For those that have CorporateTime already, we will also initiate email reminders 48 hours before a workshop begins, unless you’ve specifically disabled this feature on your CorporateTime account. Even if you don’t use your CorporateTime account, the email reminder will work. If you don’t have a CT account and would like to create one, see the following:

http://www.umbc.edu/oit/sans/desktopsupport/downloads/#calendar

Once the core users have completed the Basic Finance course we will begin offering the Intermediate Finance course.

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Where will training take place?
We have identified five training facilities that we will be using concurrently for PeopleSoft training. These are:
- ECS 023
- ECS 025
- AC4-B 220
- South Campus TWE-1
- South Campus TWE-2

We recognize that many people provide critical support for their department and have limited the training to half-day sessions to make it easier for people to provide some coverage and support to their home department during training.

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When will secondary users be trained?
We expect that Basic Finance and Basic HR training for secondary users will begin the week of the 14th of July and continue through the week of August 11, we will schedule a training break from August 18th through September 5th to accommodate the start of the fall semester. If needed, training will resume the week of September 8th.

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When will supervisors be trained?
We hope to begin providing supervisory training the week of July 8th. We will offer two courses per week through the week of August 11. While this seems late, in most years we have limited financial reporting during the month of July as we close our financial books for end-of-year processing. In terms of HR, we won’t have our first PeopleSoft payroll till mid-July.

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When will faculty with research grants be trained?
We have not defined the training content required by Principal Investigators (PIs). In brief conversations with some faculty they have expressed the opinion that PIs would prefer good written documentation and will work with support staff in their departments to learn the system. If that is in fact the view of most PI’s we may do PI training by request.

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Once I’m trained, how can I practice what I’ve learned?
One of the benefits of PeopleSoft is that the software allows you to run multiple versions of the software, called an instance. As such, we can have a version specific for training that is loaded with data to support the training examples we will use in class. We will have another instance called the Sandbox. The Sandbox is named as such because it allows people to play” with the system and enter transactions. Once someone has completed training we will set up access for that person to the Sandbox. People can use the sandbox from their office and test out what they have learned. In addition, each Friday during June we will offer what we call Supervised Sandbox;” in which PeopleSoft experts in the training rooms work one-on-one with users on a drop-in basis to answer any questions you may still have.

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Is there written documentation for me to use?
To support the campus the Delta team will provide written documentation for each business process during training. In addition, there is a tremendous amount of documentation associated with the design process that we have available under the Delta organization on Blackboard. Finally, both the HR and Fianance versions have extensive online help about the software—not UMBC’s implementation of it—that is available immediately after logging in.

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How do I get support if I have a question or problem?
During the first few months we anticipate that there will be many questions as everyone on campus, including HR, Finance, and Procurement, is getting used to the new system. Ecause these applications are diverse, it is not practical to provide a single phone number for support. We will work with the Training and Support coordinators to identify a few peer mentors” in each division. The peer mentor” will be trained to provide basic help and support to others within the division. If a problem comes up that can’t be solved by a peer mentor, the peer mentor will contact the Training & Support coordinator for the division. That person will have access to resources within the HR and Finance support teams and will submit the question. Once an answer is determined we will update all the Training & Support coordinators with the answer and post this to the web FAQ at www.umbc.edu/peoplesoft.

Our goal in using this approach is to quickly pass along answers to questions to a broad group of people so we can build expertise. We will evaluate how this works and adapt the approach as needed.

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Do I need anything special on my computer to use PeopleSoft?
PeopleSoft is a web-based system and uses a web browser to access the software. The Delta team has found that PeopleSoft, like Blackboard, works best when accessed through Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) version 5 or higher. Under Netscape 6 we noticed that the software tended to periodically abort and would need to be restarted. We are hoping to test the system under Netscape 7 and will let people know what we find. If you are a Netscape user for email and browsing we recommend that you keep using Netscape for general web browsing and email and open IE when you want to use PeopleSoft. If you are a Macintosh user we have verified that IE for the Macintosh will work fine. For Linux users, we recommend that you use the latest version of Netscape.

In terms of your computer hardware we have found that since PeopleSoft is a web-based system it generally requires less computer power that Microsoft Office or similar products. For older computers you may notice a slowdown if you are running many other applications at the same time as PeopleSoft.

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