1 What top two or three objectives would you like to see achieved through this leadership development process? Convincing others to want to change Giving actions or suggesting paths to those you have no official oversight over

2 Please describe the personal benefits that will allow you to feel this workshop was most beneficial for the team as a whole: Openly communicative of feelings behind ideas and thoughts

Section II. Description of the Team 3 What two or three things do you think are most important for your workshop facilitator to know about this team before we work together? Variety of backgrounds

4 How open are you to participating in this workshop (scale of 1-5)? Completely Closed, Somewhat Closed, “Wait and See” Attitude, Somewhat Open, Very Open “Wait and See” Attitude

5 Share why you chose this response. Please include your response in your comment (e.g., “Very open because...”). Wait and see because I do not understand what it is these sessions are supposed to do, come from, or support. Not much was explained to me, and I did not know I was on the team.

Section III. Leadership Challenges 6 What challenges or changes may be coming up in the near future that would be helpful for us to know about in advance? The Graduate School has been used to customized applications and DBs, that were housed and administered by ourselves. I feel that there will be a loss of control, to a degree, that may not be realized.

7 What do you feel will be primary obstacles to your leadership team’s implementing necessary changes? Multiple systems at once. Unclarity of how multi-system migration will proceed.PS SA cannot be immediately customized. Integration of existing department systems, db’s, etc into PS. PS’s User Interface does not seem friendly. Collection of data that is not provided in peoplesoft

8 What might come up in this workshop that may be controversial, that would be helpful for us to know about in advance? That I think UMBC could have chosen a better road, over the years, to an institution-wide system, than Peoplesoft.

9 What haven’t we asked above that you think would be helpful for us to know, to achieve the greatest value during our time together?

Section IV. Personal Insights 10 What’s your perception of how others view this team? I think others dont know the team exists. If they do, we are those that will change the direction of the campus’s business operations to be more flexible and knowledgeable.

11 What aspect of your professional experience do you hear yourself complain about most often? That the job I am in is not where I want my career to go. I do not know where I want it to go. I may still do enterprise systems implementations, I’m just not sure I agree with how it is being done in this case.

12 If you could change anything about your personal leadership style, what would it be? To stay on task, not get distracted. To follow more closely the projects done by those I am in charge of. To understand why parties outside my circle of influence do not always treat my style of change and suggestion seriously.

13 What legacy do you want to leave from your influence as a key leader at UMBC? Be selective in what I do and do it right. Work hard and fair to meet expectations, but not overwork to attempt going beyond. Question the questionable.

I use peoplesoft hr/finance very infrequently, but when I have, or I once had to interface a report it spits out, it did eventually do what we wanted it to do. A workaround had to be used, PS and OIT would not allow us a more direct access to its data. Also the formatting for the report to spit out was limited and non-negotiable. The act of getting the report had to be done manually, and could not be automated in anyway.

The user experience is unfriendly, not intuitively organized, unsightly, too many screens, and hard to use.

I have had more experience in planning phases, testing, and implementation of PS SA beginnings.

PS works better than our old SIS and gl systems. It will definitely propel us to new heights. I think a better solution than peoplesoft for our campus ERP could have been chosen many years back, that could have propelled us to even greater heights. I am told customizations hurt us and hampered upgrading in PS HR, so we are now leaving alterations out of SA. What kind of modern, flexible systems does not allow modularity and customizations? I think it is a sign of poorly engineered, bloated, proprietary software.

The software does not fit my personal style of IT implementations, I am a more do it yourself, open source person. I do believe companies can use 3rd party ERP and department systems, but PS is not one I would put my trust in. PS is one of the main driving factors as to why I will be leaving the university in the next few months, after 4 years of service.

The reports give what is expected, in a timely manner that is reliable. The web interface works, most of the time. Checklists allow ability for a lot of expansion on business processes not otherwise implementable in PS.

Backend based off of Oracle is nice.

The fact that the software and company in general know the field of higher education, and the product is written specifically for that purpose.

The visual and hierarchical organization is cluttered, too many screens, too much data entry that may not even be used. Vocabulary is hard to understand. Documentation (beginner to advanced) is hard to understand or non-existent and hard to find. My entire user-level experience with the system was not user friendly, and even borderline counter productive at times.

Web interface is not updated to the modern web. Slow screen changes, little use of modern web standards, locked to certain browsers, no cutting edge technology (ajax, web 2.0, xhtml, svg).

The future of the platform seems to be going nowhere. Not enough modularity, flexibility, and future expansion for unknown and not-existing-yet uses. Say we want to have a enterprise wide XYZ tracker, that PS does not implement because we have came up with the idea ourselves? I perceive that there would be limited to no PS option.

Chose an ERP system (probably 10+ years ago when talks and budget started) that has many of the same good attributes as PS, but a more flexible, future-looking, and open/transparent functionality and structure to it.

I do not pretend that I could make a better choice myself, but I like the idea of campus ERP systems like the Kuali Project, an open source collaborative between many universities to implement a community-driven open-source ERP system. Also, a company that I like the ideals of more than Oracle, yet does not quite have a system on the scale that we need, is CollegeNet. They are one of the best, forward thinking companies I have ever worked with in the professional IT market. Qualities that Collegenet has, would be ideal qualities that a company selling us our ERP system would have.