by Felicia Fonseca
Daily Lobo
The Finance Department was in the hot seat Friday in Woodward Hall.
As the only department that fully implemented the Banner system, people from the Finance Department fielded many of the questions about what to expect.
Banner is a Web-based system designed to eliminate many of UNM's paper-based administrative and business systems. UNM purchased the system and began testing and training in August 2002. The project, which was expected to take five years to get up and running, is about halfway finished. The Finance Department implemented the system in July 2004.
During the question-and-answer session, people listed frustrations, including stress, training and testing, as problems connected to implementing the system in the Finance Department.
But Fred Youberg, Project Link coordinator, said those are learning experiences.
"No matter how much communication you do, how often you plan training and how well you think you planned that training, you can't possibly even imagine the kinds of situations you are going to run into," he said.
Some people have struggled with Web applications malfunctioning. That can happen when the Internet is down, he said.
Youberg said changing to the Banner system can be stressful for some staff members. He said learning it can be frustrating, because it's an added chore on top of their other duties.
Training is also difficult, Youberg said. He said faculty and staff members told him there wasn't enough training or that it was hard fitting training sessions into their schedules.
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Youberg said Project Link, the team handling the implementation, will focus on more real-life training for other departments. He said with finance, many of the mock situations used in training did not approximate the real world.
"We're going to fix that," he said.
Because the system created a lot of stress for faculty members, Youberg said there will be more workshops about stress during future implementations of the system.
UNM is behind other universities in applying a major system. The University of Illinois was the latest university to fully implement the Banner system.
Youberg said UI ran into a lot of problems in the amount of time it took students to register. He said UI was trying to implement a system that would allow all students to register at once online. The high cyber traffic caused the system to slow down, Youberg said.
UNM recruiting and admissions is scheduled to go live in October. Financial aid will start using the system in January, and registration will be done with Banner in May 2006.
Youberg said a team will visit UI next week to discuss how to effectively implement admissions and recruiting without falling into the same problems UI did.
Bonnie Young, who has led project implementation endeavors at other universities for almost 30 years, said many faculty members are fearful of new software. She said a lot of people say they are happy with the way things are and are afraid a new system will be difficult to learn and will take time from their jobs.
"We understand from other universities the long-term advantages that we are going to recognize may not be recognized until after all these systems are in place," Young said.
Some of the concerns mentioned during the discussion included the system's user-friendliness, how to deal with the stress of learning Banner and the system's servers.
Banner is slow or down fairly often, said Moira Gerety, CIRT director.
"I know it's very frustrating when you can't get into the system your life revolves around," she said.
A lot of those problems will be fixed soon, possibly with more servers, Gerety said. But the Web servers used to access Banner are usually what causes it to crash, she said.
"We know we're changing the way people do their work," Youberg said.
Managers and supervisors should cut their employees some slack and realize staff and faculty members are working with a system many of them don't understand, he said.
