Colleague Merger and Consulting Work

The Vermont State Colleges System’s (VSCS) core Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is Ellucian Colleague. The Colleague systems is a critical foundation that supports many of our key business processes and data including student academic records, course offerings, student accounts, student financial aid, and finance.

We have been on Ellucian Colleague for a number of years and operate under one shared instance of Colleague with a number of customizations built into the system to support targeted business process at each institution, sometimes in a unique way.  The transformation ahead presents opportunity for us to redesign our business processes and in doing so to make strategic adjustments to the configuration and use of Colleague to adapt to a more streamlined practice. 

The VSCS went through an RFP process and has chosen to partner with higher education technology consulting firm Ferrilli to support us in Business Process Review (BPR), develop and deliver on a timely project management roadmap that aligns with our transformation timeline, support us with both subject matter experts and technical augmentation, and provide training, education, and support to our stakeholder community.

Process and Recommendations

As of May 13th, the Ferrilli consulting work is nearing the end of the Business Process Review (BPR) phase of the project. Through the BPRs, Ferrilli consultants conducted approximately 40 BPR sessions documenting: current business processes, understanding current roadblocks and bottlenecks, and identifying opportunities to streamline processes, improve the student experience, and better leverage the technology. These sessions have collectively included 91 VSC staff in the areas of admissions, records and registration, financial aid, finance, and student accounts.   

Ferrilli has now begun presenting the initial drafts of their assessments, which includes recommendations, decision points, timelines, and dependencies. The recommendations will be structured to clearly delineate between those focused on merging existing processes at the integrating institutions and which may be opportunities for system alignment to support more efficient/consolidated back-office processing or improvements to the student experience.  Recommendations will also include the amount of effort we might expect of VSC staff, and the number of hours expected of Ferrilli resources to implement. 

What’s Next? 

  • Ferrilli consulting will be reviewing assessments with functional teams and finish BPR assessments in the next couple of weeks. 
  • Final assessments will be used to inform an executive summary for sponsors and stakeholders, and a Ferrilli led presentation for sponsors and stakeholders will be scheduled.
  • Ferrilli has drafted a high-level timeline bringing us from May 2022 to October 2022. They will also be compiling a list of the decision points highlighted within the assessment reports, along with deadlines, and potential cross functional impacts. Based on these decisions, a more granular project plan will be developed including an implementation schedule.

Project Governance:

This project is being “owned” by the Administrative Operations team and will be accountable to the project sponsors for key decisions. 

  • Project Sponsor: Kellie Campbell, CIO
  • Project Team: this team will be the core migration working group, supporting the day-to-day work for this project.  This will be the guiding team that will work with both Ferrilli and our functional/IT teams, and will identify items that need to be raised to the project sponsor and/or owner.  Membership includes names below and many are already in a functional lead position. 
  • Functional and IT teams: we have a number of colleagues from across the system that will be engaging in BPR interviews and working closely with our Ferrilli resources to support the work needed for each module in Colleague.  Functional teams will engage at different times in the process, depending on where we are with the project calendar. 

Project Core Team:

  • Jae Basiliere (NVU), VSU Transformation DEI Workgroup
  • Kelley Beckwith (CU) , VSU Advising Team Lead
  • Ryan Dulude (CCV), VSC Financial Aid Team Lead
  • Doug Eastman (OC), VSC Director of Information Systems
  • Sushma Kondlapundi (OC), VSC Business Intelligence Manager
  • Michael Martel (OC), VSC Director of Data Center Administration
  • Kathleen Mason (VTC), VSU Transformation DEI Workgroup
  • JP Rees (CCV), VSC Registrar Team Lead
  • Deneen Russell (NVU), VSC Accounts Receivable Team Lead
  • Toby Stewart (OC), VSC Controller
  • Adam Warrington (CCV), VSC Admissions Team Lead

We thank our colleagues who support bringing a lens of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion to our work in addition to pulling in key stakeholders who bring critical perspective as we work through this project.

Ferrilli Updates

  • Message from Chief Information Officer: Update on Ferrilli Project (6/29/22)

    The following message is from Chief Information Officer Dr. Kellie B. Campbell: In our last communication, available on our transformation website, we provided an update that Ferrilli had neared completion of Business Process Reviews (BPRs) and were validating findings.  Since then, consultants have reviewed their initial assessments with functional teams to deliver official assessment and…

  • Administrative Operations Team Update (6/6/22)

    All Administrative Operations teams have completed initial discovery and begun the hard work of moving into the design phase. As they concluded Discovery, the Employee Services team provided an excellent summary of our strengths and areas of opportunity. They will be focusing first on student employment-related design work and will then move on to other…