Road to CA

Anita Lynn from Datatel will be coming to Allegheny December 10th and 11th to lead two Process Mapping workshops. Both will be held in Murray 116, from 9 am - 5 pm.

On Dec 10th, Anita will be helping us map our Constituent Management processes and on the 11th we'll be looking at Contribution Management processes. Those people who should attend these workshops will be notified by Todd Fox. Lunch will be provided.

Todd, Matt and I are once again heading to Fairfax, VA, this time for two days of Contribution Management workshops. We're looking forward to meeting up with our fellow Cohort F-ers (oh oh - just realized how rude that sounds! Note to self: find a better way to refer to our group!) and comparing notes on how our conversions are going.

Speaking for myself, I'm also looking forward to a pilgrimage to Whole Foods, though sad that we can't bring home a cooler full of goodies like last time.

We've had a very busy time over here in CA Conversion world lately! Here's the short version of what we've been up to:

• Contribuiton Management at Datatel in VA went very well. Todd learned that several delivered reports will replace custom reports currently used in Benefactor. I liked hearing that!


• Anita Lynn from Datatel spent two days on campus helping us work out best practices for constituent and contribution management, and then create Allegheny-specific documentation for these areas. While she was here she also requested a meeting with the Business Office, so that we could begin to discuss with them some of the changes that CA will bring.


• We're working through the alphabet soup of conversions. The official first test conversion started with L1, and we are aiming to complete N4 very soon. In most cases we are still receiving relatively low numbers of errors - and in some cases no errors. Our N2 (Employment) conversion has produced the highest number of significant errors and we're currently examining those closely to determine how best to resolve them.

We are still aiming for a live conversion window of July 15 - August 15, 2009. So far, nothing in our first test conversion indicates we'll have any trouble meeting that goal.

I've often thought that I've missed my calling. I should have been a Quality Analyst for software companies. If there's a bug in software, I always find it....whether I'm looking for it or not!

During our N1 (Other Addresses) and N2 (Employment) conversions we noticed that the conversion process had created duplicate addresses in a certain situation. We were able to offer Datatel a scenario where everything was set up properly on Benefactor, but where we ended up with the same address being created twice in Colleague. They have acknowledged that this is a bug - one they discovered a few weeks before we brought it to their attention - and that a fix for it is coming in the January CA software update.

That's good news. It means we can ignore the 5000+ address ambiguities we got with the N1 and N2 conversions - at least for now. In the second conversion test we'll probably still get some address ambiguities, but we'll deal with those then.

Otherwise the conversions are still going well, with small numbers of errors. We're getting very good at sifting through the reports and figuring out what needs to be done to make an error go away. And we're starting to keep notes on each type of error we get and how we handle it - which should save time when we run the second conversion.