CSCU committee hears Banner migration update, flags integration delays with vendor

At a special meeting of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) Special Media and Technology Committee, CAO Michael Mondrain delivered an update on the Banner migration work, saying two of the system’s primary projects were marked yellow because of data‑migration delays the vendor (Ellucian) attributed to internal staffing difficulties. "We just did a kickoff for the CT State project," Mondrain said, noting the project will be included in future reports.

The update introduced new Gantt charts intended to sit between the portal’s detailed project view and the high‑level rollup. Mondrain described the charts as "rough time frames of when the various phases are supposed to be taking place" and said they were created in response to committee feedback to provide more usable oversight. "I expect those both to be fully green," he added about the two projects currently flagged yellow.

Regent Ari Santiago framed the yellow markings as cautious oversight rather than alarm: "We're showing yellow because we're extremely detail oriented and wanna flag any potential miss or slight delay that exists so that there is no daylight between us on that comms," he said. Committee members agreed that persistence of a yellow status should trigger a deeper review; discussion settled on two meetings in a row as a potential trigger to consider a deeper dive and three meetings as a clear threshold for escalation.

The committee probed technical approach and timing: Mondrain explained that the vendor and project teams break work into overlapping chunks—design, build and validation run in parallel across discrete modules—rather than a strict waterfall sequence. The committee also discussed validation practices and user testing; Mondrain said business‑area owners will do representative sampling to validate modules before go‑live.

To complement Gantt reporting, Mondrain proposed a KPI tracker for integrations and provided an example: "Give me a number. 37. 23 of them have been completed," he said, listing completed and outstanding integrations as a way to show concrete progress alongside timeline bars.

Mondrain also showed Ellucian’s generic project model—an 18‑month illustrative timeline used in vendor materials—to align expectations with the vendor’s planning assumptions. To reduce unnecessary variation across campuses, he said the administration is requiring migrations to a common baseline, placing Scott Coopy on all five projects and adding four integration engineers (two hired, two in recruitment). He said a system‑level oversight body will meet this month to adjudicate substantive differences and provide higher‑level oversight.

The committee did not take a separate formal vote on the status items beyond accepting the report; members requested the expanded Gantt and KPI reporting continue and agreed to escalate if yellow statuses persist across meetings.