Edition 3 2021

We might not be able to sing as well as the cast of Hamilton (not that it stops us…), but we take our rehearsals just as seriously.  Between the 8th and 11th of May, we conducted our third ‘dress rehearsal’ of all the activities we will need to do to bring the new Student Management System (SMS) live.

Running through a schedule that included 382 tasks over the four-day period, we:

• Migrated 63,525,246 records into the new SMS with only 35 minor errors.  That’s a 99.99994% success rate.
• Cutover 33 integrations between the SMS and other systems, including Blackboard (vUWS), Allocate+ and SyllabusPlus
• Completed a set of 257 tests to confirm that the system was working as expected.

The errors in the data migration were easily identifiable and manually updated. Simulation 3 was a success and the chance to practice all the tasks and coordination across our team, the broader ITDS team and colleagues from across Western was very valuable.  This simulation also included vendors from some of our key integrations which again was invaluable to provide confidence towards Go- Live. We also learnt some good lessons and identified ways to do some things better for our fourth and final Go-Live Simulation 4 in August 2021.

Well-deserved congratulations go to Basem Faid, who was recently recognised as one of the Vice President Finance & Resources Employees of the Month!  Basem is one of our tireless Senior Analyst Programmers in the SMS Project Team.  If you’ve recently seen a demonstration of the Resulting Process in the new SMS (RePS), you’ve enjoyed his handiwork.  In addition, Basem has been instrumental in the development of the SyllabusPlus, InPlace and DiPSM integrations and has worked collaboratively with others in ITDS, Western more broadly and with vendors.

The new SMS is not a like-for-like swap of our current Callista SMS with a new system.  It’s a transformational project for Western and one of the biggest technology implementations in our history.

Watch this 2 minute video for an overview of all the new SMS components that will be going live on 4 October 2021.

Click here to watch

What do you want to know more about?

Thank you to everyone who have invited us to their team sessions recently to learn more about our new SMS.  Email us back if you’d like to arrange a refresher or more information to help get your team prepared for Go-Live or let us know if there’s an SMS topic or feature you’d like to hear more about and we will include it in the next edition of the newsletter.

Contact us at: smsproject@westernsydney.edu.au