December Regents Meeting

Performance was the focus of discussion at this month's review of the Enterprise Project. Regents were disappointed, but not surprised, about the problems. Staff outlined a strategy to improve performance and now that the student implementations are nearly done, there's time, staff, and energy to devote to these problems. Regents felt students were owed an apology by PeopleSoft as they had not received the quality of service they deserved this semester.

Human Resources Management System (HRMS) and Center for Human Resource Development (CHRD) managers are holding meetings with staff that the Deans have appointed to coordinate the payroll and other implementations over the next months. These contact people are very worried about the performance issues, since payroll will add more users to the system. HRMS managers have said they will postpone the payroll implementation if system performance remains poor. Technical staff said that they will probably be able to assess the impact of these new users on the system by mid-January. Also, we will have had some performance improvement experience and may be able to better evaluate our ability to impact performance by then. In the meantime, HRMS managers are urging functional HR staff to plan "as if" payroll will be implemented in June/July as planned.

Rumors are going around that payroll has been delayed because of performance issues. This is not the case.

Staff have identified about 30 possible "bottlenecks" to date that are affecting performance; some solutions are already in testing. The one with the most impact on the Web Registration system is the problem of "runaway SQL." Basically an SQL is a request for information stored in the database. The software scans much more data than necessary in search of the information, taking much longer to locate it and send the information back. IBM is assisting with the solution.

Another problem is that all requests end up in a "shared pool" in the Oracle database. This pool (and the "pipes" leading to it) gets clogged with "old" SQL and prevents other requests for information for being processed. Hence, the "server is busy" message. As a result, the pool has to be "flushed" four times an hour. The more users on the system, the more quickly the pool becomes clogged. The technical and Web teams think the problem is an overabundance of SQL connections to the database and are testing a solution this week. This fix, if successful, will minimize processing by a second or two. This is probably a good example of the typical problem and outcome the teams will explore. Each fix may only shave seconds off a process, but those seconds will add up.

The Performance Team will report to the Sponsors weekly on outcomes, preparing a "report card" on their work to distribute to interested staff.

PeopleSoft can do a lot to help and the Big 10 universities implementing PeopleSoft, who are having the same problems as the U, can provide PeopleSoft with information and assistance. Several PeopleSoft vice presidents and managers visited the U on December 6. Originally they planned to discuss the PeopleSoft financial system, but various groups they met with throughout the day (including the Sponsors and project managers) focussed the discussion on poor performance. PeopleSoft staff were candid about the quality problems they were experiencing and described what they were doing to ameliorate them.

Comments from staff who met with PeopleSoft throughout the day included the following: PeopleSoft doesn't seem aware of the time it takes their customers to implement their software, how much extra work customers have to do when "patches" and "fixes" arrive piecemeal, how a "simple" upgrade to 7.6 is not "simple" from a customer perspective, and how upgrades have to be fit around necessary implementations of parts of the system making the decision about when to upgrade a complex one. There was a sense that although the company was addressing the problems from its organizational point of view, they seemed to lack a sense of urgency about the actual performance problems their customers are experiencing. And there seemed to be no "silver bullet" that would have a big impact on performance problems. A telephone conference call is scheduled soon between Executive Vice Provost Bruininks and the PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway. Sponsors discussed other strategies to add urgency to our request for help. No word yet on the "action items."

Questions? E-mail jposeley@umn.edu