Welcome to the start of another academic year! We hope you had a great summer and enjoyed time with friends and family. During the summer months, our Project Ensemble team has worked hard on designing new business processes, building and extracting data, testing, evaluating, and participating in training. We are thankful for the dedication and talent of all of those involved with this important work.
Project Ensemble is a multi-pronged project as we implement software in three areas (Advancement, Finance and Human Resources) and across four distinct and separate organizations (Champlain, Middlebury, Saint Michael’s and GMHEC). Our efforts are leading the way for Higher Education, which means we are exploring new terrain, both for us and our vendors. We have spent this summer assessing where we are at, and what we have achieved thus far. We also reminded ourselves that we aspire:
- to leverage modern day cloud technology
- to implement innovative, better than best practices (and to document those new processes)
- to learn with and from each other (and ensure stakeholders are properly engaged and trained)
- to achieve operational efficiencies which will create better experiences for students, staff, faculty and donors
After a thorough review of our project plans, and recognizing the work still needed to be done, we have decided to move both the Advancement and the Finance go-live dates from the 4th quarter of 2018 to the 1st quarter of 2019. At this point, Human Resources and Payroll are still working towards the April 1, 2019 go-live date. However, we are working through a detailed assessment of their work still to be done as well. Once we have ironed out all the details for all three modules, we will share further detail.
I applaud all the hard work accomplished thus far and have no doubt that this investment into new technology will strengthen our member institutions and their long-term strategic goals.
Corinna Noelke
GMHEC Executive Director
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