Road to CA

Today is the start of Cohort F! And what better way to celebrate than with cake?

Stop by Murray Hall after 1 pm today, when we'll have a cake available to mark the official beginning of our Colleague Advancement implementation. While you're there, Todd can show you the reams and reams of paper we've gone through so far during the LBPM person-matching preprocess.

CA or Bust!

For those of you with EXTREMELY busy schedules, I've summed up the past few months in picture form. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words...

On Monday of this week we had our first look at the conversion process in the CA Conversion Overview Webinar. We now have a better idea of what the next several months hold for us. We also have a lot more documentation - pages and pages of file mappings and a very detailed conversion manual.

I'd write more, but I have to go read now.

It's taken us a little while to work out how best to make use of the LBPM process, which matches PERSON records on Benefactor with the same PERSON record on Colleague, if it exists. At this point it appears we have things under control and we are now confident we'll get through the rest of this process in time for conversion. Three recent changes have led us to embrace LBPM as our friend:

• A long standing performance issue has been resolved, which will greatly increase our productivity.
• We're following the lead of other schools and writing our own reports from the LBPM output. These new reports include much more detail about the potential matches found, making it easier to determine at a glance if it is indeed a match.
• We've added middle name comparisons to our duplicate criteria to reduce the number of possible matches reported. You'd be surprised how many {insert first name here} Smith's there are on Colleague!

We continue to make progress towards our conversion. In the past week we have:

• Completed the first of our Colleague Advancement training classes at Datatel - Constituent Management


• Completed the FUNDS pre-process


• Set up the Conversion environment (thanks, Pete!)


• Refreshed the data in the Benefactor test environment


• Run thousands more records through the LBPM person matching process

With this, our pre-processes are nearing completion and we are about ready to move on to step G in the Alphabet Soup list - creating translation tables for code files and code tables. I'm told to expect this to take a while.