New CMS staffers—(l-r) Sarah Cordett, Kim Kee and Lyn Ledyard

IT staffers focused on CMS Project

by Jim Powell

An undertaking as large and all-encompassing as the Common Management System (CMS) Project requires a broad-based and solid foundation on which to define and build a changing and growing product. Maintaining lines of communication, coordinating project logistics with project stakeholders, and planning for the eventual needs of end users are some of the key roles of Information Technology staffers Lyn Ledyard, Kim Kee and Sarah Cordett. While each has a different role in the project, all would agree that there is no such thing as a “typical” day.

Lyn Ledyard joined IT in the summer of 2004 to assist project leader Amir Dabirian lay the groundwork of the CMS project. A recent graduate of Florida State University with a degree in marketing and international business, Ledyard manages the project’s logistics.

“I coordinate all of the meetings, prepare agendas, prepare supporting materials, and take meeting minutes,” Ledyard explained. “The biggest challenge is getting members of the steering committee in the same room at the same time. For one meeting, there wasn’t a common time for almost six months into the future.” She makes every effort to schedule as many people as possible before making phone calls to ask if participants’ schedules can be adjusted in order to attend.

“People want to be involved,” she said. “They like the broad-based approach and having the opportunity of including others to voice their needs in the process, making their jobs better.”

Although new to the campus, Ledyard is at home in the university environment. While still a student at Florida State, she held a staff position in the management department in the college of business, where she assisted both students and faculty. Still, there are new challenges.

“CMS has its own vocabulary,” she noted. “There’s TUG, HUG and FUG, just to name a few.” While she’s gotten a handle on the CMS lexicon, there’s also the university’s own vernacular which includes PIMS, PPS, SIS+, and FRS. “It’s a real challenge taking notes sometimes,” she said. “But I’m learning lots along the way.”

Ledyard hails from a military family and has lived abroad, including four years in Japan. Her favorite location is Okinawa. “I loved it there; it was a small island with beautiful beaches,” Ledyard recalled. She still stays in touch with friends she made while in middle school in Okinawa, many of whom now live in Oceanside.

She enjoys the Southern California lifestyle and the ability to choose between going to the beach or riding her snowboard in the Southland’s ski areas.

Ledyard lives in Irvine with her two dogs, a corgi-Chihuahua mix and corig-shinu inu mix. She enjoys doing “crazy dog people stuff” including going to the dog beach, dog park, dog café, and the dog bakery. When lounging at home, the dogs relax in matching pajamas and, during holidays, sport costumes designed and made by Ledyard’s younger sister, a fashion design major at Florida State.

Training end-user staff to use CMS Human Resources and Finance modules is the job of Kim Kee, the newest face on IT’s CMS team. Fullerton will be taking advantage of the experience Kee garnered in a similar position for the CMS project at Cal State Long Beach where she did documentation and end-user training. Originally hired as a budget administrative assistant at CSULB, Kee was promoted to budget analyst where she worked with HR techs to debug problems in the HR module.

“If a process failed, we had to figure out why it failed. The technical team needs to have some functional knowledge of the processes, but it also helps if the functional person can help the technical side out,” she explained. “So I was in the middle.”

Kee is at the ground floor of developing training for Fullerton’s future CMS end-users. “Right now I’m attending the module work team and user work team sessions, getting familiar with Fullerton’s business processes, understanding the outcomes of those meetings and the decisions that have been made,” she explained. “As the need for training gets closer, I’ll start preparing the end-user training material. Once the system is online, I’ll lead hands-on classroom training.”

Kee is excited about the CMS implementation process at Fullerton and its emphasis on involving users in the development process. “CSUF is relying less on consultants for this project than at other campuses,” she commented.

She concedes that using CMS will be a major change. “Change is inevitable with technology. It’s not that things are going to be so different—the goal is to standardize processes and to maintain the integrity of the data,” she explained. “The goal in training is to show that the same information still exists and to show users how to get to it. It may take some people a little while to get used to it, but I can guarantee that those who use CMS will be saying ‘this is great’.”

Kee was born in Hawaii, where many of her family still live, and moved with her parents to Riverside when she was six years old. She shared her father’s interest in baseball and collecting baseball cards from an early age. She continued this interest into high school where she was the sports editor of the school newspaper and covered the team’s CIF championship game from the press box at Dodger stadium. She still collects baseball cards, and is a NASCAR racing fan. Kee earned an associate of arts degree at Riverside Community College and is continuing work toward her bachelor’s degree.

Sarah Cordett is new to CMS, but is not a newcomer to Information Technology, having served as the division’s communications coordinator for the past three years. Cordett is still working in the realm of communications, only now her responsibility is developing documentation and training for CMS.

First on her list of things to do is configuring the new SharePoint server, a Microsoft solution for distributing and sharing information; she is serving as the system’s content administrator. “It’s a document repository used for knowledge management,” Cordett explained. “And we can do many things with it, like track changes to documents using versioning, or if necessary, restrict access to confidential or sensitive documents.”

Once SharePoint is customized to meet the CMS project’s needs, Cordett will work on repurposing classroom training material for presentation on the web. She’s currently laying the ground work for that effort. “Right now I’m going to business process and fit-gap meetings and familiarizing myself with the system,” she said. “I’m really a representative for the end user. Being new to CMS, I ask a lot of questions; because if something is not clear to me, there’s a good chance it won’t be clear to others.”

Cordett came to Cal State Fullerton shortly after graduating from the University of Texas, Austin with a degree in English literature. Her first job out of college involved selling internet advertising. “It was a very bizarre experience,” she recalled. “It was a very small office and my boss quit after I had been there only two weeks.” The experience was enlightening, in a way. “I learned that I’m not a salesperson,” she laughed. “And when you find that out about yourself, you really should get out of the business.”

When not at work, Cordett concentrates her energies on her family. Although she loves ballroom dancing and fondly recalls her time reading Tolstoy and Keats, she confesses there are not enough hours in the day to do everything. “I haven’t had any time in the last year to read a good book,” she said, “but I’m doing what’s important to me.”

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