Enterprise Systems Renewal - Student Information System

The Project

UC San Diego’s Student Information System (SIS) is a 30+ year old mainframe which urgently needs to be replaced in order to ensure business continuity. An ecosystem of home grown and third party applications have grown up over the course of those 30 years and also need to be assessed for remediation or replacement as part of the system renewal. This is a major multiyear, multimillion dollar project of the highest priority for campus.

The Problem

  • The enormous breadth of business processes that interact with the SIS have incomplete, out-of-date, or missing documentation. 

  • The SMEs who created the original SIS no longer work at the university. 

  • The new SIS must accommodate all students on the main campus, School of Medicine, School of Pharmacy, School of Public Health, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Rady School of Management, and Extension, all of which have different and intersecting student populations and differing business models.

My Role

Here’s me standing next to the stickies we generated during an early process landscape session.

Here’s me standing next to the stickies we generated during an early process landscape session.

I was asked to serve as the Business Process Lead for this project, tasked with completing a comprehensive analysis of all of the current state business processes related to the functions of the Student Information System, coordinating Ideal State ideation, conducting process improvement activities where possible, and producing functional requirements. 

Relational diagram of team roles, with my role as Business Process Lead serving as the translator and bridge between the core team leadership and business process team members.

Relational diagram of team roles, with my role as Business Process Lead serving as the translator and bridge between the core team leadership and business process team members.

The Team

Left to right: Lean Bench Manager, me, Project Manager, Procurement assistant. Pleased after working a lengthy process mapping session together.

Left to right: Lean Bench Manager, me, Project Manager, Procurement assistant. Pleased after working a lengthy process mapping session together.

I directly manage a team of 5-10 business process and systems analysts on multiple parallel workstreams in support of the project’s overall goals. That work is guided by collaboration with 7 other members of the core team, who range from technical and subject matter experts to change management specialists. Together, we receive guidance from the ESR program leadership, the Academic Senate, and the SIS governance committee and translate that to drive the comprehensive work of the project. 

My Approach

I started by drafting the life cycle of a generic student persona, and from there held brainstorming sessions to validate the high level map, and continue identifying all of the different populations of students who would be serviced by the SIS.

Initial rough draft of the student lifecycle and population types, with note stickies about further research and population characteristics.

Initial rough draft of the student lifecycle and population types, with note stickies about further research and population characteristics.

We ended up with a matrixed categorization, which included:

  • Undergraduate

    • Traditional

    • Transfers

    • International

  • Graduate

    • Domestic

    • International

  • School of Medicine

  • School of Pharmacy

  • School of Public Health

  • Rady School of Management

  • Scripps Institution of Oceanography

  • Extension (Continuing education)

    • Corporate

    • International

I drew heavily on my UX background to establish a user-first approach and knew that deeply engaging with our subject matter experts (SMEs) would bring the greatest value to the project throughout the Current and Ideal State analyses.