Financial Aid Project Receives “Go” from Leadership

As part of the in-scope work for the Student Information System (SIS) Project, we will be replacing our current financial aid system, Pro Student Aid Management (ProSAM), with a new system, Oracle Student Financial Planning (SFP).

On June 7, 2022, a go/no-go decision meeting was held for the Financial Aid Project with key project stakeholders in attendance, including leadership from Financial Aid, Graduate Financial Support and SIS Project governance. The decision was made to move forward with the project based on current progress toward meeting the previously established project readiness criteria (outlined in this article). 

As significant progress has been made toward meeting the readiness criteria, leadership agreed that the best decision for the project, its stakeholders and students was to move forward. Additionally, key stakeholders in both Financial Aid and the Graduate Financial Support Unit expressed their eagerness to begin the project, noting that the risks of waiting to begin outweigh the risks of moving forward.

Immediate next steps for the project are:

• Forming the core and extended project teams and a steering committee
• Holding the formal project kickoff
• Completing current state process mapping

The project team has adjusted the project plan to start slowly while remaining readiness criteria are met and backfill positions are hired and onboarded. The team is also assessing the outstanding readiness criteria to understand project impact and will adjust the project plan accordingly.

The SIS Project team would like to thank everyone who has already put many, many hours into this project for current state process mapping sessions and project planning. We are excited to move forward with this next step and work to improve the financial aid experience for students, faculty and staff.