Program Release a success

The university has declared the two-year project Program Release a success, with new tools to improve the way grants, accounting, travel and other processes are handled at UW System and on the Madison, Milwaukee and Extension campuses.

The 2008 Program Release was an effort to develop new ways to administer grants, travel, staff effort reporting, accounts payable and accounting processes. During the week of Feb. 18, the new integrated system was brought up successfully, ahead of schedule and with no glitches.

Darrell Bazzell, project sponsor and vice chancellor for administration, explained that changes to grant reporting were required by the government and other funding agencies. “These new systems enable us as institutions to more efficiently track grant income through expense and time accounting, and then back to the funding sources,” he says. “This helps us reduce processing time while putting data at the hands of end-users.”

Program Release brought another benefit to the university as well. “The most important thing that happened through this project is that we got people to work together toward a common goal,” says Elise Barho, project manager in the Division of Information Technology. “This is almost more significant than any software brought online, because it taught us to work across departments on a common goal in a very large institution.”

For more details, visit http://www.vc.wisc.edu/ProgramRelease.