Implementation Minus 40 Days: Considered Pragmatism Under Pressure

Abstract

No library relishes the thought of a system migration. Preparations can take as long as time allows. Imagine the surprise and anxiety of the UCSC implementation team when we discovered that we would be going live with our new Alma environment 40 days sooner than our timeline had assumed. This presentation will detail how UCSC made quick and pragmatic decisions about what services and integrations were deemed necessary for go-live and what was saved for the other end. Though no one hopes for an accelerated timeline for go-live, our experience would be of interest to libraries planning migrations, as well as those libraries already in Alma, since many of our configurations and integrations have, by necessity, been implemented in our production environment. In our session, we will cover the communication, collaboration,
management, and leadership that went into our rapid implementation. We will cover the choices we had to make, how we communicated with staff about the core competencies needed for go-live, the importance of data testing for our smooth implementation, and how much we did. As the resource management functional expert and the acquisitions functional expert, we were responsible for a large percentage of the migrated records and the decisions surrounding those records.