The Challenge

The Draper Approach

Results Realized

The Challenge

In 2004, the Georgia General Assembly passed legislation mandating changes in the methodology used to calculate high school GPA's relative to eligibility to receive the HOPE Scholarship. This change in law required that the Georgia Student Finance Commission (GSFC) be the agency responsible for collected high school senior grades and performing the necessary calculations. In its current environment, GSFC did not possess the systems or processes for fulfilling this mandate.

The leaders at GSFC released a RFP seeking a system that could accommodate the Transcript Exchange component as well as serve as a mentor system. XAP Corporation based in California was selected as the vendor as they currently had implementations of mentor systems throughout the country that provided transcript exchange capabilities. The Georgia implementation was unique in that it represented new technology as no other transcript implementation had included the calculation of GPA's.

Realizing that this project involved new technology, a large and diverse number of stakeholders, a "hard" deadline and high risk factors, the Executives of GSFC realized that they would need outside expertise to ensure success. Given Draper & Associates track record of delivering projects on-time, on-budget and exceeding expectations at the Commission, the President of the Commission engaged Draper to project manage the implementation.

The Draper Approach

As a consultant to the GSFC for more than three years, Draper & Associates has been providing program management support on this multi-faceted and challenging project. Our consultants range of expertise combined with training in project management methodologies have allowed GSFC to realize extraordinary results in a resource constrained environment. Draper was engaged by the Commission to provide project management for the implementation. In this role, some of the key responsibilities and deliverables included:

• Development and management of the overall project plan and related schedules.

• Utilizing the Work Breakdown Structure methodology, defining and delineating all of the tasks required to successfully deliver the required solution.

• Coordinating the project deliverables with all contractors and internal staff.

• Producing and presenting regular progress reports to GSFC executives as well as executives in other key state agencies.

• Facilitated weekly cross-functional team meetings that provided updates on the project status to the project stakeholders and GSFC Executive Management.

• Developed the GA411 Transcript Exchange Pre-Installation Workbook that was distributed to more than 500 HOPE participating high schools across the state in January. This workbook provides the beginning steps for each school to prepare for the implementation of the transcript exchange. The distribution and timing of this workbook has been deemed instrumental, as it was the first formalized communication of this effort to numerous high school counselors, registrars, and IT personnel across the state.

• Assisted in defining the requirements for extract solution necessary to obtain the required core GPA data from more than 30 different computer systems housing student information in an endless number of transcript formats with differing grading scales and weighting schemes.

• Developed the plan, schedule and resource requirements for the deployment of the solutions to the high schools throughout the State that ensure that all schools were online at the required date. This entails contacting all schools, collecting their school profile information, and deploying the best-suited software application for extracting the necessary information for determining student HOPE GPA's.

• Led the development of GSFC's internal solutions for calculating HOPE GPA's, as well as creating and implementing the quality management plan. Utilizing guidelines from the Project Management Institute, this plan assured data integrity and quality control.

Results Realized

The HOPE GPA calculation system went live in February 2007 and ran preliminary calculations for distribution to all high school counselors. In addition, the preliminary eligibility list was provided to all college, universities and technical schools in the State so that they can begin to assemble financial aid packages for candidate students.

Final HOPE GPA calculations were conducted in June 2007 and the system has been characterized as a major success. From project initiation, some were expecting the new process to be a major failure that would result in a public relations disaster for the Commission. The project management expertise provided by Draper & Associates played a critical role in the success of the project. Executive management of the Commission commented that if the Commission can do the Transcript Exchange it can do anything and it is the "10" against which they can measure every future GSFC initiative.